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Biography of a Design Project through the Lens of a Facebook Page

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Abstract

This paper presents spazioD, a design case around the topic of dyslexia. Building on selected contributions from the literature on infrastructuring in participatory design and publics, it proposes that digital platforms are artefacts that can help infrastructuring the formation of publics and study their biography. The paper then unfolds describing the context in which the case was situated, presenting a specific digital platform (i.e. Facebook) and how it was enacted. The contribution of the paper is threefold: it provides a practice-based instance of the activities entangled in the infrastructuring of publics; building on this description, it shows how a digital platform can contribute to infrastructuring; and, finally, it articulates how the analytical tool embedded in the digital platform contribute to and influence the interpretation of an infrastructuring process and their limitations.

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Notes

  1. Following the recommendations of the Australian Dyslexia Association, in this paper we use the world assessment to indicate what is often indicated by the term “diagnosis”. A focus an assessment drives educational planning and equitable provisions, rather than reinforcing a medical perspective.

  2. http://spaziod.org/sites/default/files/file/videos/SED.mp4

  3. http://www.spaziod.org/sites/default/files/file/videos/SED_x264.mp4

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the people involved in the project, members of the interAction Lab and ODF Lab at the University of Trento for their contribution to the activities described in this paper. Thanks to Adriano Siesser for the graphic material and to Linda Tonolli for her pictures of the event. Thanks to Dan Britton for letting us use the typefont designed by him (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). Finally, thanks to the reviewers for their thoughtful comments which significantly improved earlier versions of this paper. This project has been possible thanks to the funding granted by EIT Digital and by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca through the research program ‘Città Educante’, project code CTN01_00034_393801.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. interAction Lab, University of Trento, Via Sommarive, 9, 38123, Povo, Italy

    Maria Menendez-Blanco & Antonella De Angeli

  2. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Antonella De Angeli

  3. Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal, Portugal

    Maurizio Teli

Authors
  1. Maria Menendez-Blanco
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  2. Antonella De Angeli
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  3. Maurizio Teli
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Correspondence to Maria Menendez-Blanco.

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Menendez-Blanco, M., De Angeli, A. & Teli, M. Biography of a Design Project through the Lens of a Facebook Page. Comput Supported Coop Work 26, 71–96 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9270-4

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