Toward a Public Rhetoric
Through Participatory Design:
Critical Engagements and Creative
Expression in the Neighborhood
Networks Project
Carl DiSalvo, Marti Louw, David Holstius,
Illah Nourbakhsh, Ayça Akin

Introduction
In her paper, “P for Political,” Beck poses the question: “What con-
stitutes political action through computing?”1 Certainly, the his-
tory and range of contemporary projects in Participatory Design
provide a rich and varied set of answers to that question. To those
answers, we would like to propose two others: prompting critical
engagements with technology and enabling people to use technol-
ogy to produce creative expressions about issues of concern.
By
critical engagements we mean experiences that bring about
the reflective analysis and interpretation of issues, building from
traditions in education and in the arts and design.2 In particular,
we are interested in facilitating encounters that reveal and/or cal
into question common assumptions and beliefs about both tech-
nology and the urban environment, and the possible relations
1 Eevi Beck, “P for Political: Participation
between these subjects. The goal of these critical engagements is to
Not Enough,” Scandinavian Journal of
provide people with experiential knowledge so that they can make
Information Systems 14, no. 1 (2002):
informed and insightful suppositions and judgments concerning
77-92.
the capabilities, limitations, and applications of technology.
2 In the arts and design, see Anthony.
By
creative expressions of issues we mean imaginative and
Dunne and Fiona. Raby, Design Noir: The
Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Basel:
resourceful representations of problems, or possible interventions
Birkhäuser, 2001); Grant Kester, ed., Art,
into the conditions of a problem, which have convincing and aes-
Activism, and Oppositionality (Durham,
thetic qualities. Regarding the use of technology, our interest is in
NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Leah
how people apply and manipulate the capabilities of a given tech-
Lievrouw, “Oppositional and Activist New
nology while infusing the artifacts or systems they produce with
Media: Remediation, Reconfiguration,
their own voice and style. Our goal is not to teach people to be
Participation,” inProceedings of the 2006
ACM Conference on Participatory Design:
technologists per se, but to help bring people to a point of techno-
Expanding Boundaries in Design (New
logical fluency where they are comfortable with and capable of
York: ACM Press, 2006): 115-24; Nato
using technology beyond familiar uses.
Thompson and Gregory Sholette, eds.,

Taken together, critical engagements with technology
The Interventionists (Cambridge:
and the creative expression of issues through technology begin to
MIT Press, 2006); and Material Beliefs,
http://www.materialbeliefs.com
form a public rhetoric: They constitute the activity of discovering,
(accessed August 1, 2009).
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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inventing, and delivering arguments about how we could or
should live in the world.3 The artifacts or systems conceived or cre-
ated become rhetorical by their persuasive intentions and capabili-
ties, and by the way they inform and/or provoke a response from
or dialogue with others.

This notion of a public rhetoric has salience to design, which
itself can be portrayed as a form of argument. 4 Positioning design
as rhetoric does not claim some essential or deterministic quality
of technological artifacts or systems. Nor does it suggest that
design is fundamental y duplicitous, as contemporary pejorative
notions of rhetoric might imply. Rather, positioning design as rhet-
oric calls attention to the ways in which the built environment
reflects and tries to influence values and behavior and explicitly
recognizes the capacity of people to design artifacts or systems
that promote or thwart certain perspectives and agendas. In this
light, design—inclusive of both the process of making artifacts and
the artifacts made—can be considered a discursive activity, and
Participatory Design can be cast as using design to enable people
to take part in public discourse in new or more effective ways. This
participation becomes a kind of political action through computing
as people use technology to gather data, communicate, and solicit
support for their perspectives, with the hope of initiating change.

We developed the Neighborhood Networks project to facili-
tate and investigate this particular kind of political action through
computing. The project includes the production and evaluation of
multiple public participatory design workshops that provide
opportunities for neighborhood residents to engage in the open
exploration and application of emerging technologies in the con-
text of neighborhood activism. In the Neighborhood Networks
project, we are particularly interested in the use of robotics tech-
nology in urban community contexts. In this paper, we describe
the structure and activities of one of the Neighborhood Networks
programs and discuss the experiences and outcomes of the work-
shops as evidenced through conversations among participants and
the artifacts designed. In the discussion, we cal attention to the
ways in which the Participatory Design process fostered critical
engagements with technology and enabled residents to creatively
express local concerns and suggest possible technological interven-
tions to the conditions of those concerns.
3 See Richard Buchanan, “Design and the
Project Description
New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the
Neighborhood Networks was a community-based Participatory
Philosophy of Culture,” Philosophy and
Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 83-206.
Design research project that ran from 2007 through 2010. The proj-
4 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games
ect consisted of multiple community workshops in selected neigh-
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) and
borhoods in Pittsburgh, PA. In this paper, we report on the first
Richard Buchanan, “Design and the New
community workshop, which took place in the Lawrenceville
Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the
neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In the Lawrencevil e workshop, seven
Philosophy of Culture,” Philosophy and
Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 83-206.
meetings were held over an eight-week period. Meetings occurred
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in the evenings, once a week, for two hours. The meetings were
held at a multi-use community center, which was chosen because
of its standing in the community as a place for people to gather
and host neighborhood activities. Neighborhood residents were
informed of the workshops through flyers posted around the
neighborhood and in the center, notices in a neighborhood print
bul etin, the email lists of community organizations, and word-of-
mouth. The summer program began two weeks after these post-
ings, with approximately 20 residents participating in the first
evening’s activities. Of the initial 20 participants, 14 continued
through to the final workshop. Participants varied in age and gen-
der, including four middle-school-aged children (3 boys, 1 girl),
eight adults aged 35 to 55 (5 women, 3 men), and two adults over 55
(1 woman, 1 man). The participants were al residents of the neigh-
borhood. None of them claimed to have technical expertise, and
four characterized themselves as artists or artistic. The workshop
was separated into four distinct phases.5 The activities of each
phase were developed to build toward our project goals, leading
the participants through reflective inquiry into the limitations,
capabilities, and potential uses of sensing and robotic technologies
in their neighborhood, with the intention of enabling them to dis-
cover and invent novel and compel ing applications of these tech-
nologies for local y relevant issues.

Throughout the workshops, we took an active part as design
researchers in enabling the use of the technologies and structuring
the concept development and prototyping activities. Specifical y,
our own design activities were focused on constructing the means
by which the participants could discover and express connections
between the capabilities of a given set of technologies and issues
that were salient to them. Our primary role, then, was not as
designers of goods or services in the familiar sense, but as facilita-
5 Because of space limitations, the
description of the program has been
tors and educators. In the end, the concepts and prototypes were
significantly abridged. A more in-depth
developed and produced by the participants with our assistance
description of the program’s activities is
and feedback, but they were ultimately outcomes of the partici-
available in Carl DiSalvo, David Holstius,
pants’ own desires, imaginations, and skil s.
Illah Nourbakhsh, Ayça Akin, and Marti
Louw, “The Neighborhood Networks
Project: A Case Study of Critical
Phase 1: Initial Engagements

Engagements and Creative Expression
The first phase of the workshop was designed to familiarize partic-
Through Participatory Design,” in
ipants with the basic capabilities and limitations of sensing and
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference
robotics technology and to ground the use of these technologies
on Participatory Design Conference
within their neighborhood. Because of the novel character of the
(New York: ACM Press, 2008): 41-50,
technologies and the desire to provide a solid foundation for their
and in Carl DiSalvo, Marti Louw, Julina
Coupland, and Mary Annq Steiner,
future design work, we chose to move through Phase 1 in the first
“Local Issues, Local Uses: Tools for
two meetings.
Robotics and Sensing in Community
Contexts,” in Proceedings of the 2009
Scavenger Hunt with Commercial Sensors
ACM Conference on Creativity and
Our initial objective was to provide participants with a broad intro-
Cognition (New York: ACM Press, 2009):
245-54.
duction to the concept and activity of technological y mediated
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environmental sensing, using professional sound-level and air-
quality sensor platforms. We began the first session with a sensor
scavenger hunt—an activity designed to excite participants and to
encourage exploration of both the technology and the neighbor-
hood (see Figure 1). As an activity, the sensor scavenger hunt
builds on prior work in participatory design that investigates the
use of playful approaches and games to motivate participation,
stimulate creative and critical thinking, and overcome hesitancy to
using unfamiliar technology.6

The sensor scavenger hunt participants, divided into smal
groups ranging from three to seven people, were given a packet of
materials, including an environmental sensor (measuring either
CO/CO2 or sound levels), a map of the area, a Polaroid camera, a
pack of film, a pen, and a printed slip of paper outlining the tasks
of the scavenger hunt. The scavenger-hunt tasks were developed
around the idea of “taking a reading.” For example, three of the
tasks were: “Find a place with the highest value for a given sen-
Figure 1
sor,” “Go someplace you have never gone before and take a sensor
Participant engaging in sensor
reading,” and “Find the least agreeable place and take a sensor
scavenger hunt.
reading.” After taking a sensor reading, participants would take a
Polaroid photograph of the place and then write the sensor read-
ings and a brief description on the photo. Participants also marked
the location of the sensor reading on the map provided.

After about one and a half hours, participants returned to
the community center to share their experiences and documenta-
tion. This activity took place around two large maps of the area (30
by 40 inches, or about 1 square meter). As participants taped each
Polaroid onto the maps, they described the place, the readings
taken, their reasons for choosing that particular place, and their
understanding of the readings.
Exploring the Neighborhood with the Canary
In the second session, participants were introduced to the
Canary—a relatively inexpensive, handheld sensing and robotics
platform that we designed and built for use in the Neighborhood
Networks workshops. The objective of this session was to familiar-
ize participants with the specific features of the Canary and to
probe the possible application of sensing and robotic technologies
in the neighborhood. Compared to desktop computers or mobile
6 See Eva Brandt and Jorn Messeter,
devices, only a few robotics prototyping tools are simple and
“Facilitating Collaboration Through
robust enough to support Participatory Design in a community
Design Games,” in Proceedings of the
setting. The Canary is an attempt to expand the range of technolo-
2004 ACM Conference on Participatory
Design (New York: ACM Press, 2004):
gies available to Participatory Design endeavors, specifical y to
121-31, and Eva Brandt,“Designing
include robotics by combining adequate sensing capabilities with
Exploratory Design Games: A Framework
basic kinetic actuation in an accessible form factor. The Canary
for Participation in Participatory
design al ows participants to easily open and examine the internal
Design?” in Proceedings of the 2004
components, touch actual sensors, and experiment with them
ACM Conference on Participatory
Design, 57-66.
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directly. The six mounted sensors visible on the main circuit board
are air quality, light, sound, humidity, pressure, and temperature.
Readings from these sensors are continual y displayed on an exter-
nal, built-in, LCD screen, which also tracks sensor highs and lows.
The Canary comes with four servomotor ports for connecting
motors to the Canary, thereby enabling prototype devices to be
animated immediately, based on sensor readings.

For the next session, participants were given a 10-minute
hands-on overview of the Canary and then asked to use it to
explore conditions both inside the community center and in its
immediate surroundings for 30 minutes. After the participants
returned, we discussed their experiences, encouraging them to
reflect on the differences and similarities between the Canary and
the professional sensors used the week before.
From Exploration to Expression
The uniqueness of the Canary stems from the way it combines ser-
vomotor outputs with environmental sensors and signal process-
ing in a single package. The Canary, as well as the artifacts
constructed using the Canary, can be considered robotic because it
enables the production of physically embodied entities that
respond to the environment. Moreover, the manner in which the
Canary “expresses” environmental stimuli is user-configurable.
Users can select one of several different sets of “expressions,”
resulting in a different mapping of sensor inputs to motor outputs.
These motors automatical y move in response to environmental
stimuli, facilitating the prototyping of reactive devices without any
programming or engineering knowledge.

To demonstrate these capabilities, we developed a simple,
single-axis, single–motor-driven mechanism that simulated a large
pair of butterfly wings. By connecting the wing mechanism to dif-
ferent servo ports, we could animate a variety of stimuli (e.g., clap-
ping near the microphone, or breathing on the humidity sensor).
After demonstrating the actuation capabilities of the Canary, we
encouraged participants to spend the final 30 minutes of the ses-
sion experimenting with craft materials (e.g., feathers, pipe clean-
ers, and cardboard) to produce objects or sculptures of their own
design that used the Canary to produce movement in response to
sensed data.
Phase 2: Concept Development and Design
The second phase of the workshop concentrated on the discovery
and invention of possible uses of robotic technology (via the
Canary) in the context of the Lawrencevil e neighborhood and its
issues. The objectives of this next session were twofold: to enable
participants to imagine what might be possible using the Canary
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and to facilitate the documentation and specification of their
designs, with at least enough definition to enable them to begin
prototyping the fol owing week. To achieve these objectives, we
developed a robot storyboarding activity.
Robot Storyboarding
Through the process of storyboarding, participants tried to make
their ideas more concrete and explicit by producing sketches and
written descriptions of their robot, in terms of its construction,
purpose, and actions/reactions over time. A key quality of story-
boards is that they do the work of both eliciting and documenting.
We provided a customized robot storyboarding sheet, with plenty
of space for both drawing and writing, and included prompting
questions organized around four themes:

• Actions: What actions wil people, things, or the

environment do that affect the robot?

• Sensing: What does your robot sense from those actions?

Using what sensors?

• Output: How does your robot react to those actions and

express what it senses?

• Communication: What do you want to communicate

through your robot? How should people feel or

respond to your robot?
Getting participants to make use of the storyboards required more
explanation and encouragement than we had anticipated. More
than half expressed strong resistance to drawing complete designs.
However, nearly all participants (with one exception) at least
roughly sketched some set of basic mechanisms or sensors they
intended to use. As a method of design and documentation, writ-
ing was more actively pursued than drawing. All participants
wrote at least a few (two or more) sentences in response to each of
the questions.
Phase 3: Iterative Design and Production
Phase 3 spanned three meetings and focused on the iterative
design and production of the final prototype for presentation.
During this time, the workshop sessions took on an “open-studio”
format, in which participants would arrive at the community cen-
ter and work on developing their prototype. This work took a
diversity of forms, with some participants forming small groups
of two or three and others working individually. In addition to
building the prototype robots, all participants were given poster-
boards and instructed to document their robot design process, and
to provide an overview of the purpose and functioning of their
robot for the final presentation.
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During this time, we—as researchers—took an active role in
scaffolding the work of the participants. We casually walked
around the room, stopping at tables and asking participants to
describe what they were doing, or asking if they wanted any feed-
back or direct assistance. Participants were at first hesitant to ask
for either. However, as time passed, and as participants ran into
mechanical or conceptual difficulties, they began to call on us for
technical assistance and to seek feedback to help them achieve
their goals for their project.
Phase 4: Final Presentation
The final session was organized as a public event, modeled loosely
after a science fair, at which participants presented their designs to
the community and invited stakeholders to come and offer feed-
back. On the evening of the event, participants arrived early to set
up their project displays, which included both the robot proto-
types and their documentation posters. Each participant, or group
of collaborating participants, was given a table to use, and the
tables were arranged around the perimeter of the room.

The use of the poster boards proved to be important,
because three of the teams were unable to finish their prototypes
to a level of completeness with which they were satisfied. The
posterboards were used by these groups as an effective means to
extend and complete the communication of their ideas via another
format. For the visitors, the posterboards served to distinguish
people and projects by establishing spatial distinctions and also
created a visual order to the room layout.

The public event was wel attended. As attendees arrived,
they mil ed about, walking among the displays and chatting with
the participants, who presented their projects and discussed their
process and motivations. In addition to the 12 participants, another
25 people or so from the community attended, including family
members, neighbors, two representatives from two different
community organizations, and a city planner from the City of
Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. Participants said they
enjoyed the opportunity to share with their neighbors, but
they were most excited by the presence of, and the opportunity to
interact with, the city planner and the representatives from com-
munity organizations.
Evidence of Critical Engagements and Compelling Expressions
As stated, the goal of the Neighborhood Networks project is to
prompt critical engagement with technology and to enable people
to use technology to produce creative expressions of issues of con-
cern. Evidence of such engagements and expressions were found
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in the conversations that emerged throughout the workshops and
in the artifacts participants created. In the fol owing paragraphs,
we describe and analyze these conversations and artifacts, with an
eye toward articulating how they came to form a kind of public
rhetoric. Because the amount and range of discussions within the
workshop were extensive and broad, we have focused our descrip-
tion and analysis on two activities and a single prototype.
Scavenger Hunt Activity: Shared Experiences of Productive
Questioning
The scavenger hunt activity in particular prompted a rich set of
critical engagements between the technology, the neighborhood,
and the participants who found the experiences both exciting and
chal enging. They were excited by the way they had to col aborate
to understand and make use of an unfamiliar technology that they
perceived as usually being for “experts,” and were challenged
because the sensors were at times ambiguous in their readings or
even contradicted the participants’ expectations. Through these
experiences, the participants engaged in reflective analysis and
interpretation of the sensing technology and its relation to their
local environment.

For example, many groups used the air quality sensor to
explore obvious sites of pol ution, combustion, or natural rot, such
as sewers, portable toilets, commercial waste bins, tail pipes, and
exhaust vents. However, most of these sites did not emit stimuli
detectable by the given sensors, resulting in readings that did not
differ from casual readings noted on the street. In particular, the
readings for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or CO taken in a
garden did not differ much from those taken next to an industrial
waste bin. In other cases, the differences in sensor readings were
counter to what participants expected. For example, through their
sensing, participants discovered that the readings of VOCs can be
higher in a playground next to a tire swing than near a sewer (as
the rubber tire swing off-gasses chemicals, but no gasses were at
that moment coming through the sewer). In undertaking these
sensing activities, participants immediately perceived and noted
such differences between presumed and measured air quality and
would “talk through” both the way the sensors were functioning
and the environmental factors.

The ways in which participants col aborated in the use of
the sensors were also significant in shaping their processes of ana-
lyzing and interpreting the sensor technology. As they took sensor
readings, and particularly if the readings were confusing or sur-
prising, participants would ask each other questions, such as
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whether they needed to adjust the sensor and, if so, how to do so.
During outings, participants would stand shoulder-to-shoulder,
often with multiple people holding the sensor platform, and vie to
examine the readings. The photo documentation was also under-
taken col aboratively. Across multiple groups we witnessed a pro-
cess in which one or two people would hold the sensor platform,
while another person posed next to the location being sensed,
often pointing at it, while the remaining participants would stand
back and together frame and take the picture. In this way, the act
of taking a sensor measurement was transformed from a solitary
action into a col aborative group activity. In addition to operating
the sensor platforms in a col aborative way, we observed partici-
pants frequently discussing, debating, and negotiating where to go
and what to measure once there. Identifying the most agreeable or
disagreeable place was not an opinion-neutral task, and the assign-
ment resulted in group conversations about what was agreeable or
disagreeable and also what was sense-able and not sense-able.

By the end of Phase 2, participants felt capable of using the
technology and were enticed by its potential applications. They
also were able to begin to question—in an experiential y informed
manner—the accuracy and appropriateness of sensing in the
urban environment. While participants appeared to enjoy the
social activity of sensing, they were also initial y suspect of the
sensing technology because of the ambiguity in sensor readings
and the mismatch between perceptions of a place and its measur-
able qualities. The things observed, encountered, and experienced
through the scavenger hunt would later spark conversations con-
cerning neighborhood issues and the potential applications of
technology to address those issues.
The Robot Camera Prototype: Engaging the City Through
Dialogue and Concepts
Traffic emerged as a paramount issue in the summer workshops.
Nearly three-quarters of participants’ concepts in some way tried
to address problems related to speeding and loud traffic on neigh-
borhood streets. As a salient example of how participants pro-
duced imaginative and resourceful interventions for the problem
of traffic, one participant named Mary conceived of and designed
a device simply cal ed The Robot Camera, which would monitor the
sound levels of passing cars, and when a certain sound level was
exceeded, a robotic finger mechanism would take a photograph
using a digital camera. The photograph would then be “sent to the
city” to report on the car. In addition to visually recording the
noise incident with a photograph, it was also suggested that an
audio recording could be made that would document the actual
sound and level.
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The Robot Camera generated significant discussion among
participants. Through the storyboards, discussion, and prototyp-
ing, participants material y and dialogical y surfaced and traced
multiple themes regarding technology and the city, including legal
issues, questions concerning technical feasibility, and questions of
efficacy. The fol owing discussion is striking because it so clearly
il ustrates the ways that Participatory Design activities can gener-
ate sophisticated reflections on the relations between technology
and the urban environment.

Upon first presentation of the Robot Camera idea, numerous
participants stated there might be “issues” with such a device, par-
ticularly surrounding the legality of capturing pictures of people
purportedly breaking the law. But in the course of the conversa-
tion, several participants noted an existing surveil ance system in
the city that captures people running red lights, and they offered
this system as a point of comparison, ral ying to the existing tech-
nology/system as a defense of the proposed system. This discus-
sion prompted further discussion of “the city” as a specific entity,
evidently distinct from the individual or groups in the neighbor-
hood in terms of what it legal y and technical y is capable of doing,
exemplified in the fol owing exchange between two participants:

A: Well the city does it. [referring to municipal traffic

monitoring cameras]

B: But that’s the city and they can do things like that. It’s

dif erent than just us doing it, and I bet even for them it’s tough.

A: Well they [the drivers] are breaking the law. And if people

are speeding, gunning their engines and all that, or breaking

windows or writing all over [referring to spray painting],

they are breaking the law, too.
B:
Yeah, but I still don’t know if we can take their picture and

then send it around like that to the police or whoever or projecting

it on the street.
Participants also discussed the technical feasibility of the Robot
Camera. These discussions il ustrate the developing understanding
of the capabilities and limitation of the technology and the capac-
ity for invention and resourcefulness in its application. The first set
of feasibility questions concerned the Canary itself and ways to
add additional functionality to the limited capabilities of the
Canary. Mary was concerned that the microphone might not be
capable of distinguishing moderate, but nonetheless annoying,
sounds. As another issue, participants wondered if the Canary
could record the time of the incident. After learning that the
Canary did not and could not record time, a participant proposed
an alternative: You could have two synchronized cameras—one
that took a picture of the event, and the other a picture of a clock.
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The issue of how to communicate this information to the
city was also raised. Mary realized it might be difficult to automat-
ical y email this picture to the appropriate person at the city. She
and others assumed such a thing might be possible, but they were
unsure of how to do it. As Mary noted, “The Canary connects to
the computer, and if the camera is also connected to the computer
and the computer is on the Internet, you should be able to do it.”
As the discussion continued, a suggestion was made that perhaps
the photograph could be sent in separately, either as a digital pho-
tograph or even as a Polaroid sent through the mail system. When
asked if she would be able and wil ing to mail the photograph, she
said, “Yes, I could do something like that; I could total y do some-
thing like that. It could do the sensing and the recording, and I
could send it on to the city.”

The design of the Robot Camera thus sketches the ways in
which participants began to bring critical engagements to bear on
the production of creative expressions. The design process
prompted participants to examine together their concerns with the
capabilities of the given technology and, in the case of the Robot
Camera, to conceive of an intervention that united these concerns
and capabilities. Through this endeavor, questions surfaced that
caused them to reexamine their understanding of the technology
and to imagine how the technology might operate within the
realm of their neighborhood. In a sense, through the design pro-
cess, they were able to experiment with the invention and discov-
ery of arguments for the local and specific uses of a given
technology, having each other as an initial audience for these argu-
ments.
Final Presentation: The Public Communication of Local
Issues and Desires
Through the final presentation event, participants were able to
communicate their perspectives to others in a manner intended to
convince, inform, and/or provoke responses. The event provided a
forum whereby the process and artifacts of critical engagement
and creative expression came together to constitute a kind of pub-
lic rhetoric. During the prior weeks, the participants had been the
audience for each other; but at the final event, the audience for
their arguments about issues in the neighborhood expanded to
include other residents, as well as members of neighborhood orga-
nizations and a city planner. During the evening’s busiest time,
more than 30 people were in attendance—not just simply viewing
the work of the participants but engaging them in significant con-
versations. These conversations focused on the technology; the
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Figure 2
Participant presents Robot Camera prototype.
sensed data and its interpretation; the process of making the pro-
totypes; and most of all, they were conversations around the ideas
and motivations behind the prototypes—about the lived experi-
ence of the Lawrenceville neighbors, concerns in the neighbor-
hood, desires for change, and possibilities for intervention. In the
process of demonstrating their prototypes, participants communi-
cated why they created what they had. From our observations of
the conversations, these explanations, more than the details of the
prototypes themselves, garnered the most follow-up questions
from the city planner and community leaders (e.g., “Why would
you want to do that?” or “Why would you only want to run this at
night?”). These questions and the responses from the participants
formed a casual dialogue in which the issues and desires of the
participants were elucidated.

The ideas of the participants were not expressed through
the prototypes alone; the robotic objects in isolation did not consti-
tute the argument, but rather worked as part of an argument
embodied and expressed through multiple materials. Many of the
prototypes were only partial y functional. This incompletion was
actually a benefit because it challenged participants to develop
multiple ways of expressing their intentions. In doing so, most of
the participants had constructed stories to communicate their
ideas and used the posterboards or forms of documentation as
support for these stories (see Figure 2). In many ways, these stories
functioned similarly to scenarios common to a user-centered
design process and were grounded in the authentic experience of
participants, cal ing attention to and leveraging the lived social
and material particularities of the neighborhood. Thus, the robot
prototypes, support documentation, data, storytel ing, and conver-
sation operated together as a rhetorical structure and format.
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Conclusion
Historical y, one of the objectives of Participatory Design has been
to enable people to take part in the design and development of
technological artifacts and systems. However, as Beck and others
have stated, participation as we have commonly thought of it is
“not enough:” We must consider how we can extend the participa-
tory design project to new political forms and objectives. The
explicit goal of the Neighborhood Networks project was to facili-
tate and examine the use of Participatory Design as a means to
produce such critical engagements with technology and to give
people the opportunity to use technology to produce creative
expressions of issues of concern—as a kind of political action
through computing. Throughout the workshops, as evidenced in
conversations, activities, and artifacts, participants developed
informed analyses and interpretations of sensing technologies and
created imaginative and resourceful interventions to address local
concerns.

In addition, the Neighborhood Networks project begins to
describe a kind of Participatory Design practice that builds on the
rhetorical character of design to constitute a public rhetoric. In the
context of a public rhetoric, the aim of Participatory Design, then,
is to enable participants to increase their visibility and the volume
of their voices and to capture the imagination and attention of oth-
ers in support of their agendas. In the case of the projects dis-
cussed in this paper, the arguments created were made up of
prototype robots, documentation, and the narratives that partici-
pants constructed to convey the idea of their robot: how it would
“work” and “fit” within the neighborhood.

Framing Participatory Design as an endeavor concerned
with enabling the discovery, invention, and delivery of arguments
has consequences for considering how we, as university research-
ers, might enable and promote these endeavors. It requires ongo-
ing investigation into how technology functions in the
construction and delivery of arguments, as a tool for discovery,
and as a rhetorical device that supports certain kinds of argumen-
tation and possesses certain persuasive qualities.7 These qualities
not only are a characteristic of the materiality of the technology
(i.e., its affordances), but also are reflective of the standing of sci-
ence and technology in contemporary culture. The authority of sci-
entific data and access to the technological tools required to col ect
and produce that data typical y reside with scientists and trained
or licensed professionals. The interpretation of this data remains in
these same hands and is released to the public through scientific
publication, policy reports, press releases, and the media. Putting
sensor technology and the data gathered into the hands of citizens
to form and bolster public arguments that draw on the gathered
7 See, e.g., Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
60
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“evidence” is a novel direction for political computing—especial y
when those arguments take on situated, embodied representa-
tional forms of data to creatively comment on, protest, and suggest
possible interventions for local conditions of concern.
Acknowledgements
We thank all of the participants in the Neighborhood Networks
program and the community organizations and leaders who sup-
ported and encouraged us through our first project. This research
was made possible in part by a gift from the Intel Corporation.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 3 Summer 2012
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