Longstanding practices of participatory co-design have sought to engage communities in the development of shared resources, services, and technologies. However, approaches such as citizen-centered design and digital civics bring these design methods to bear on the development of digital technologies in support of civic and third sector organizations in particularly complex and rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes. Such endeavors frequently need to engage marginalized, under-served and hard to reach communities. In these design spaces, the ‘Digital Citizen’ becomes a contested concept, deserving of deeper exploration. In this one-day workshop we seek to bring together the DIS community, industry practitioners and third sector representatives to mutually explore the concept of the digital citizen, its boundaries, and opportunities, and in response to a rapidly changing environment of smart digital services, the ways in which design methods might be evolved to better support designing for and with these digital citizens.

We propose an innovative approach to empower urban planners by integrating comprehensive and qualified citizen input into the planning of the 15-minute city (15mC) through immersive digital technologies. Our methodology includes (1) enabling citizens to annotate their real environment using augmented reality, (2) generating urban space alternatives based on generative AI and citizen annotations, (3) allowing modifications to AI-generated alternatives, (4) providing immersive 3D simulation environments for experiencing these alternatives, and (5) facilitating better negotiation between citizens and political players to identify the optimal solution. This process aims to account for diverse stakeholder interests, ensuring inclusive contributions and an experiential understanding of potential urban adaptation.

Public sector organizations have been increasingly turning to design in their pursuit to innovate and address pressing challenges that seem intractable through their existing ways of working. Design’s presence in the public sector is still a relatively recent phenomenon ridden with many challenges. Through a study of three municipalities in Sweden, we present tensions designers face as they work their way to build design capacity. We argue that making a place for design in organizational systems and their ways of working requires skillfully navigating these tensions. We describe each tension in terms of their contradictions embedded in dualities and discuss designers’ ways of managing them. Practical applications for design and public administration are also discussed.

Municipalities around the world have become increasingly reliant upon digital technologies in their everyday operations. In pursuit of a faster, cheaper, and more efficient local government, service platforms and applications that mediate citizen-government interactions, smart city infrastructures, and automated decision-making systems have proliferated. More recently, digital technologies are also sought to address socially complex issues and foster civic engagement. These ambitions, motivated by both rational and democratic perspectives, however, confront many challenges such as designing with wide heterogeneous groups, navigating organizational structures, and dealing with the political agendas and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Designing digital technologies for municipalities, therefore, requires an ability to address the technical, social, institutional, and political challenges critically, practically, and holistically. This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to (1) explore how this could be achieved and (2) map the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for designing public digital services and technologies.

Rapid digitalisation in public services in the Nordic countries inevitably excludes citizenswho have limited digital skills. At present, public libraries are playing a crucial role in helpingsuch citizens in closing this gap, thus assuming a buffering function between public servicesand disadvantaged citizens. This policy brief recommends supporting this role and furtherexpanding it by creating an institutional model for civic engagement in the public librarieswhich bridges citizen needs and public service development.

This position paper discusses the concept of meta-services—services that bridge the gap between the existing publicservices and the latent citizen needs—as a critical element inthe transition from transactional to relational public services.The paper is based on the preliminary findings of an ongoingresearch project, Civic Agency in Public E-service Innovation(CAPE). The project explores new forms of civic agency inpublic sector service development in collaboration with publiclibraries and citizens in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden