How Should We Design Technology With Diverse Stakeholders Who Wish Not to Attend Design Activities Together?

Research Background and Issues

• Issues and Challenges: In Nigeria, the relationship between police and citizens is strained, with mistrust and conflict hindering collaboration in technology co-design activities. Citizens are generally reluctant to participate in design activities with the police, fearing negative repercussions for expressing their true opinions. This results in biased design outcomes, preventing the development of effective community policing technologies. In this context, co-design involving conflicting stakeholders lacks existing HCI frameworks.
• Significance: Community policing is a vital component of public safety, and designing technologies that enhance community collaboration and policing transparency is crucial. The current mistrust between citizens and police necessitates exploring new methods to ensure fairness and practicality in design outcomes.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Although studies have employed methods such as Value Sensitive Design (VSD), Non-Collaborative Co-Design (NCD), and Design Justice (DJ) to address collaboration among diverse stakeholders, most assume that stakeholders can cooperate or are at least willing to participate together. In this study, the intense conflict between stakeholders calls for the development of unique frameworks and methods to address this specific challenge.

Solution

• Method or Solution: The paper proposes the "Conflict Sensitive Design" (CSD) framework, which integrates Value Sensitive Design (VSD), remote design techniques, and conflict mediation strategies to create a co-design process tailored for conflicting stakeholders.
• Innovations:
  1. Introducing conflict mediation techniques (reducing conflict, balancing perspectives, emphasizing common ground, separate meetings, formalizing agreements) to address adversarial relationships.
  2. Allowing stakeholders to hold separate meetings to reduce risks and design biases.
  3. Aggregating stakeholder inputs through phased iterations, focusing on minimizing bias and achieving shared goals.
• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques: The CSD framework consists of six stages:
  1. Identifying Stakeholders and Forming Teams: Conducting conceptual research to identify stakeholders and their core needs or conflicts.
  2. Requirement Gathering: Collecting technology requirements through surveys and interviews, ensuring attention to both parties' concerns regarding technical functionalities.
  3. Designing with Marginalized Users: Initially designing with citizens and other marginalized groups to prevent power dynamics from dominating the design outcomes.
  4. Designing with Authority Users: Subsequently designing with police and other authority figures to reduce tensions and mediate differences.
  5. Iterative Design until Consensus: Achieving consensus through multiple rounds of design iterations by sharing and adjusting stakeholder inputs.
  6. Evaluation and Prototype Development: Developing prototypes based on the final agreed-upon design and assessing usability.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Results:
  1. Successfully designed a community policing technology comprising two core components: an invisible body camera and a community policing application (featuring anonymous reporting functionality).
  2. Improved interaction and collaboration between police and citizens, despite the absence of direct meetings during the design process.
  3. Effectively resolved design biases and conflicts through gradual mediation.
• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:
  1. Optimized the design process in contexts of power imbalances and mistrust between stakeholders.
  2. Overcame the unique challenge of stakeholders' unwillingness to jointly participate in design activities.
  3. Utilized innovative mediation techniques, such as separate meeting strategies and formal agreements, ensuring stakeholder autonomy and comfort.
• Experimental and Evaluation Results:
  1. Mixed-method research, including surveys, interviews, design workshops, and focus group feedback, revealed that most participants were satisfied with the method and final design outcomes.
  2. Ensured broader acceptance of the technological solution due to more balanced design participation.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. Limitations: Gender imbalance (fewer female participants), reliance on personal networks for police recruitment, and high costs associated with additional iterations.
  2. Future Directions:
     • Exploring the scalability of CSD in other conflict-prone scenarios (e.g., prison management systems, food aid programs).
     • Investigating adaptability across broader demographic and sociocultural contexts.
     • Introducing low-cost solutions to mitigate the burden of excessive iterations.