“But Will They Listen?” Learnings From a Design After Design Experiment in Civics

A growing research area within DIS and HCI is digital civics, where technologies are explored to create new interactions and relationships between public officials and citizens, but what happens to the relationship after a public digital service is implemented? In this paper we present one view on how we can create opportunities for regular citizens to take agency and contribute to the rigid process of public digital design. We argue that designers and researchers should focus on civic participation in design after design as an opportunity to increase democracy. We base our results on learnings from an engagement with a volunteer-based IT helpdesk at a public library in Denmark and three employees from the Danish Agency for Digital Government. In this paper we focus on a specific period of the engagement which consists of three workshops and backstage design activities.