Designing Participation for the Digital Fringe

Digital participation is emerging as a key issue for researchers, designers, educators, industry and others as government policy increasingly seeks to include people in decision-making about all aspects of their lives. Yet, that tends to focus predominantly on mainstream communities of highly urbanized settlements, often neglecting segments of society lacking access to resources, digital technology or telecommunications infrastructure. Likewise, people from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, or who are socially excluded, such as people living with disability, the elderly, disadvantaged youth and women, people identifying as LGBTI, refugees and migrants, Indigenous people and others, are particularly vulnerable to digital under-participation, thereby compounding disadvantage. This workshop proposes to identify practical, innovative, and sensitive design solutions to support digital participation for disadvantaged communities in urban and regional environments; foster digital skills within and across communities; investigate the role of proxies in digital inclusion; and discuss design strategies for sustaining digital inclusion in the long run.