18 Nov Grass­roots Radio is the main char­ac­ter of a new paper pre­sent­ed at the NordiCHI ‘20 Con­fer­ence

The Grass­roots Radio project par­tic­i­pat­ed in the 11th Nordic Con­fer­ence on Human-Com­put­er Inter­ac­tion ( ’20), which took place vir­tu­al­ly on Octo­ber 25 – 29, 2020. The con­fer­ence was sup­posed to be held in Tallin, but the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee decid­ed to move online due to the Covid-19’s pan­dem­ic.

Rober­to Cib­in and Mau­r­izio Teli pre­sent­ed a paper (writ­ten togeth­er with Sarah Robin­son, Conor Line­han, Lau­ra Maye, and Christo­pher Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi) titled “Shap­ing Social Inno­va­tion in Local Com­mu­ni­ties: The Con­tri­bu­tion of Inter­me­di­aries”. In the paper, Grass­roots Radio is con­sid­ered as an exam­ple of par­tic­i­pa­to­ry social inno­va­tion projects. This kind of con­text often involves the com­ing togeth­er of design researchers, com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment groups, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to devel­op (often tech­no­log­i­cal) solu­tions to social prob­lems or chal­lenges. The paper focus­es on anoth­er cat­e­go­ry of actors usu­al­ly involved in these projects, the “inter­me­di­aries”. These are spe­cif­ic indi­vid­u­als and organ­i­sa­tions who con­tribute to these projects by trans­lat­ing inten­tions, val­ues, and expe­ri­ences between design researchers and com­mu­ni­ties. The paper can be found at this link.

NordiCHI, a bian­nu­al con­fer­ence, is the main Nordic forum for Human-Com­put­er Inter­ac­tion (HCI) research as well as a meet­ing place for researchers from acad­e­mia and indus­try, design­ers, prac­ti­tion­ers, edu­ca­tors and oth­ers work­ing with­in HCI and relat­ed dis­ci­plines from all over the world. The theme of this edi­tion was “Shap­ing Expe­ri­ences, Shap­ing Soci­ety”.