Brief
Democracy allows for the voice of the people to be heard and empowers the citizens of a country to choose their own leaders. In this project, we need to think about how we as citizens experience the political system we shape and how democracy is administered. We need to design an experience that addresses the democratic process and we used Literature review and Prototyping as our research methods.
Inspiration
We decided to do some research about democracy and bring forward our proposals at the first group meeting. Before brainstorming, I want to learn more about the meaning of the word "Democracy" and the democratic systems in different countries, such as China as well as the UK. In China, people do not have enough opportunities to participate in the democratic elections and this is because China's democratic system is indirect democracy, the member of government usually represent citizens to vote. As a result, the young generation in China has an extremely weak democratic awareness. Similar to the Chinese people, young people in the UK and USA also don't pay much attention to their democratic rights. I found this is an interesting point to do further research and compare the differences of democracy in different countries.
Picture: Zoe Yan
Data Analysis
According to the youth voting data, only 23% of youth in UK participated in the voting in 2018 and there are a few reason that young people don't vote:
1. The lack of political education translates into the political engagement.
2.Many young people refuse to vote because of the lack of trust in the political process.
3.Some young people feel marginalized by the political class and alienated from the democratic institutions.
4.Youth do not feel their views are being heard or represented.
5. The media keeps young people concerned about politics.
Source: www.civicyouh.org
People in China believe their country become much more democratic in future, but they don't have their own channels of political expression and it due to the reason of the fear of political instability.
Source: Bruce J Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma, 2016
One of the reasons that people are unwilling to vote in elections is that they doubt the way they vote, such as online voting, people usually worry about the security of voting and they feel the fear that Internet voting outcome may be influenced by the government, terrorists, and hackers. As a result, establish a credible voting platform is an essential issue in future. In addition, as a designer, we need to concern with understanding citizen's engagement in civic life and try to build a trusted interaction between government and citizens. We can provide citizens with technologies that enable them to play a greater role in the democratic process and establish a transparent democratic system.
Design Goals
1. Design towards a direct democracy.
2. Create a digital community based on transparency.
3. Create personalization through technology through technology.
4. Create trust between citizens and civil authorities.
Picture: Zoe Yan & Nyla
Low fidelity model: Nyla
Prototype
At this stage, we want to use low-fidelity prototypes to weed out major problems with the proposed solution and evaluate and validate the solution hypothesis.
In this project
1. Identifying the problem: How to strength citizen's political participation?
2. Making decisions: Functions and data of the system
4. Delights & inspirations: Rewarding activity
We selected Islington council as our Hypothetical community. We wanted to design a democratic feedback system that would help citizens express their demand as well as they can know and to supervise the government better. In addition, citizens can also know more about the implementation of construction projects. Designing Matching view, we need to nudge and motivate our users to be mindful while making sure the experience is flexible, rewarding and forgiving. The user can share their thought of the public issues with other citizens online, when their viewpoints are matched, they have a chance to deliver as one. In order to encourage citizens to participate in democratic feedback, we also offer certain rewards, such as citizens can participate in environmental activities after they participate in the democratic process.
The first Presentation & Feedback
Picture: Ziyu Li
After the first presentation, we got some extremely valuable feedback, for example, some classmate thought a platform can not be totally transparent as well as impartial and they also worried about the security of this platform. Some of them also advised us to design a platform which can be personalization. In fact, a digital democratic platform may cause people's anxiety of the information security and may let them feel distrust.
Therefore, after our reflection, we decided to design our application from the following aspects:
1. Helping citizens know about the events of their community.
2.Cooperate group of citizens.
3. Using complaint alarm system to cause for concern.
4.Improve the citizen feedback process.
Picture & Sketch: Zoe Yan
BodyStorming
In the final presentation, we want to use body-storming to generate new ideas for our further design and let the audience understanding as well as quickly revealing our assumptions and problems. We arranged everyone in our group a role, such as some of us are being a phone. There is no doubt that this method is useful for generating empathy for users.
A survey of the British people most concerned about community issues shows that the residents of the UK mostly complaint about the garbage collecting problem and noise issues, so we selected these two typical problems to the body-storm. In the body-storm, we tried to explain how we can solve these disturbing problems and let the citizens directly participate in and communicate with the community.
Picture & Sketch: Zoe Yan; Nyla.
Picture: Ziyu Li
presentation video
Reflection
For the democracy project, what we wanted to do at the beginning was to let citizens see some changes after they participate in democratic activities by the democratic map. People will find their light on the map when they express their democratic appeal. However, we want to offer possible solutions rather than just encourage people to vote. We narrowed our design down to the communities where people lived, and we wanted people to pay attention to the community projects around them, such as garbage sorting. Whereas our design lacks the division of tasks for the council, plus, we need to specify their responsibilities to solve the residents' problems. This is because it is impossible for the councillors to solve all the problems suggested by the residents.
Reference:
Bonsiepe, G. (2010) ‘Design and Democracy’ Design Issues Vol. 22 (2) pp.27-34
Hall, T. (2012) ‘Electronic Voting’, Electronic Democracy, pp.153-176
Haltofová, B. (2018) ’Fostering Community Engagement Through Crowdsourcing: Case Study on Participatory Budgeting’ Theoretical and Empirical Researches in Urban Management, Vol. 14 pp. 5-1
Checkoway, B. & Aldana, A. (2012) ‘Four forms of youth civic engagement for diverse democracy’ Children and Youth Services Review Vol. 13 (11) pp. 1894-1899
Crabbe, A. (2013) ‘Design Alternatives to the Ballot Box Voting System’ Design Issues, Vol. 29 pp. 75-88
Bruce J Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma, 2016