Paper presented at Common Ground: the DRS Conference 2002, Brunel University, September 2002

Building on Virtual Common Ground: design participation for the network age

Abstract

This paper describes a set of action research initiatives intended to disseminate the technical skills necessary to participation in an increasingly globalised design discourse. It starts by examining the shifting relationship between design, production and consumption triggered by globalisation. An account of partnerships between a network of "experts" and a range of "users" follows. This is premised on the use of available infrastructure and the sharing of modest technical skills. This has allowed partners in peripheral locations to embark on the more rewarding process of social learning and exploration of available ICTs without first having to climb a steep technical learning curve.

Using available free web-sites, which provide simple on-line editors, and a minimum of HTML instructions, a sustainable presence has been developed for a range of individuals and organisations. Face-to-face contact in workshops has been supplemented with subsequent on-line contact and knowledge sharing. A combination of simply designed web pages has been linked with the leveraging of already available internet-accessible material to provide the means to create a sustainable presence from the margins. A model developed in the context of West Africa has proved useful to the U.K. periphery with real-time monitoring of public service provision being piloted in North-East England. This approach offers a framework for the design and delivery of goods and services to increasingly diverse and extensive markets. The paper describes the approach at the level of discrete design project, problem formulation and analysis and policy formulation and feedback.

This page is maintained by
Stephen Little
Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Management
Open University Business School
Milton Keynes, U.K.
s.e.little@open.ac.uk