Careful Interventions: On Care and Participation in Design for Migration and Arrival

In 2015 and 2016 more than a million people sought refuge from conflict and hardships in Germany. While the response was ambivalent, across the country large networks of supporters formed, offering various kinds of assistance to the arriving persons. This book takes these developments as a starting point. It reports on an HCI project, building on the emancipatory traditions of Participatory Design and the Socio-Informatics approach, aiming to develop assistive technologies for forced migrants as well as their supporters. It focusses on the design process and reflects on the nature of intervening through participatory design in matters of migration and arrival. The work draws on feminist conceptualisations of care and outlines how care and participation interacted in this context to support the longterm maintenance of the design results, but also how care relations between the different participant groups undermined the democratic aims of participation. It draws out preliminary lessons for an interventionist HCI practice.

Maximilian Krüger is a researcher in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Siegen in Germany. His research focusses on the role of technology in contexts of migration and arrival, for accessing and providing various forms of care. He is also interested in technology’s mediating role in the relations between humans and the rest of nature and the kind of relations, practices and ideas of what it means to be human technology enables.