1 Introduction

In this paper, we address the problem of how to design digital technologies that support the emergence of collective intelligence for the common good (henceforth CI4CG) in contemporary societies, and we do that by locating ourselves in the field of participatory design. We engage in this intellectual program posing our theoretical and methodological contribution at the crossroad of contemporary societal transformations and the subsequent political implications for CI4CG researchers.

Indeed, current Western societies have been witnessing (although differently) one of the biggest economic crises of the history of capitalism with related political changes and the rise of political forces both at the right and the left of the political spectrum, almost all over Europe. More specifically, the economic crisis has been the result of financialized capitalism in which the main form of capital accumulation is what Harvey (2014) defined as “accumulation by dispossession”. This expression refers to the emergence and strengthening of forms of cooperation which are partially autonomous from capital accumulation, such as peer production efforts (e.g., in the technological field, Wikipedia or Free Software) or voluntary work; and to capital contemporaneously extracting value from such a forms of cooperation (ibidem).

Digital technologies are part of societal transformations in deep and profound ways, and that calls designers to engage more deeply with the political implications of their work (Hakken et al. 2015). That is particularly true, in our opinion, for fields like CI4CG, in which practitioners have been proposing a combination of technological development and progressive societal changes for a while (most notably, see Schuler 2013). Nevertheless, when CI4CG practitioners do not position themselves, they run into the risk of loosing contact with participants existing practices and desires. For example, Bosio et al. (2014) have studied a CI4CG Italian digital platform inspired by a deliberative model of democracy and they have shown how the people using it were not aligned with the deliberative democracy position, nor practically (e.g., through the use the digital platform) or discursively (e.g., in their narratives about the role of the platform in their political activity). This is why we argue that the field of CI4CG needs to find a theoretically sound and methodologically apt approach to position itself in the ongoing transformations.

2 Common, affect, and public design

Our design exploration begins with an Autonomous MarxistFootnote 1 perspective, as we see in it the possibility to renew the agenda for politically engaged digital technology designers, in particular participatory designers (Teli 2015; Teli et al. 2016). This perspective, well articulated by Hardt and Negri (2009), places the commonFootnote 2 at the centre of social relations and political intervention. The common is intended as the ensemble of the material and symbolic resources that tie together human beings. The common can be dispossessed, by a process promoting accumulation by a minority as described by Harvey (2014); or nourished, that is to preserve it and make it grow, strengthening the relations among human beings. The latter is the direction we envisage and sustain while arguing for the adoption of a design approach in CI4CG projects that draws upon the concept of affect (Massumi 2002; Hardt 2007) and public design (Di Salvo et al. 2014)Footnote 3. Massumi reads affect as distinct from emotion, the former being the pre-verbal bodily reaction to interaction, the latter being its rational simplification. Affect is therefore relevant as it points to pre-rational elements upon which rationality can, or cannot, be articulated. In particular, we argue that between the physical reactions and the rational simplifications stands the space for the construction of new participatory design possibilities for CI4CG research. That is rooted on the understanding that the affective dimension precedes, temporarily, the cognitive one and, therefore, is able to constitute a basis upon which meaningful interactions with the technologies could be built.

When referring to design, we refer to public design: large-scale participatory design practices that are community-driven (Di Salvo et al. 2012), that focuses on public formation (Le Dantec and Di Salvo 2013), and that are able to promote the emergence of digital commons (Teli et al. 2015). The core traits of public design are the focus on people’s concerns as a starting point, the attention given to the attachments people develop towards the project and the technologies, and the strengthening of social relations among the concerned people. These concerned people can sometime become a “recursive public” (Kelty 2008), taking care of the projects, spaces and artefacts that tie them together. The focus on people’s concerns make them immediately political subjectivities, instead of technology users, and it therefore stresses the need of going beyond the recurrent definition of people as “users” in design (e.g., Bardzell and Bardzell 2015; Foth et al. 2015). Recursivity in this case is intended as the capability of a public to take care of the means of its own existence, and it unfolds through the emergence of diverse concerns over time (Kelty 2008).

The potential for recursivity is what brings together affect and public design. In Hardt and Negri’s perspective (2009), the way people get attached to the common is love, which they articulate following Baruch Spinoza (and the later work of Bergson or Deleuze and Guattari). In Spinoza’s view (1677, trans. 1887), it is possible to develop rationality and knowledge leveraging on positive affects, like joy or love; while negative affects, such as fear or hate, constraint human capabilities to act. Love is an affect, and Hardt and Negri intend it as the love for being open to new social experiences and meetings and for engaging in the construction of what holds people together. Affects (love but also hate, fear, or passions) open up new research directions because they are the pre-conscious result of the bodily interaction of human beings with what they get attached to. Affects can augment or diminish people’s capacities to act, and rationality is a simplification of an affect, a filter human beings use while dealing with their physical reactions (Massumi 2002).Footnote 4

In this paper we focus on affect and we highlight a specific methodological contribution to the goal of designing publicly to nourishing instead of dispossessing the common based on affect, what we refer to as “positioning cards”. The cards are used in public design projects to elicit affective responses to the problem of politically positioning projects, one of the preliminary steps toward designing politically engaged CI4CG technologies.Footnote 5 The paper concludes posing significant research questions for CI4CG designers interested in promoting the emergence of recursive publics able to love and nourish the common as a way to rethink the relationship between democracy and technology in current societies, opening up the space for new democratic possibilities.

3 Capturing political desires: the positioning cards

Capturing what happens between people’s physical reactions and their rational simplifications, or affects and emotions, is a task empirically difficult, and that requires designers to find reasonable strategies to pursue their design goals without pretending to take over other fields of knowledge like philosophy or neurosciences, in which the theme of affect has been extensively discussed (e.g., Berridge and Kringelbach 2013; Posner et al. 2005). From this point of view, the literature on the so-called “affective turn” in the social sciences (Clough and Halley 2007) provide interesting perspectives that could help designers to inform design in a way that increases the possibility that information is deeply influenced by affects. Our proposed positioning cards, one of the possible techniques to capture affective dimensions and their political implications, is based on two pillars: the use of narrative techniques on data collection, like in-depth interviews or focus groups; and the connection between people’s desires and the technology–democracy conceptualization.

In fact, Massumi’s understanding of affect as distinct from emotion does not exclude the possibility of capturing and analysing affect. As an example, it is possible to refer to the description of self-perception and naming of pre-verbal reactions, in such a way making conscious the unconscious (Massumi 2002). The positive affirmation of conscious meaning, in Massumi’s reading, takes place through induction and transduction. The first process is the activation of a narrative on a specific affect (e.g., exclaiming “it burns!” when in pain after touching a fire), the second one is the transmission of a general discourse from a case to another (e.g., “burning is painful, it’s better to be careful with fire” when in front of a new fire). Therefore, to capture affect, operationalizing the contribution by Massumi, it is possible to elicit descriptions of self-perceptions and naming of pre-verbal reactions, in a way that makes it possible to promote induction on a single case and transduction among different cases. Kuntz and Presnall (2012) have clarified how in-depth interviews could be a suitable research technique to grab the affect dimension. Moreover, Watkins (2010) has underlined how affect could be accumulated through social interaction. It is on this premise that we build the first pillar of our methodological contribution: the use of in-depth interviews, or other narrative-based techniques like focus groups, to elicit narratives on the relationship between the interviewee and the issue at stake, combining induction and transduction.

Nevertheless, for the sake of designing digital technologies able to promote the formation of a recursive public, it is not sufficient to capture people’s affect, but it becomes necessary to turn the affective dimension into a way to project people’s affect into the future and towards the not-yet-existing-technology that is one of the objects of the design process. To do that, we need two tasks: first, to locate projection in the future in the “affective turn”; second, to decline such role for the needs of specific processes of technology design. To accomplish the first task, we propose to go back to the roots of the affective turn, that is, the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (as read also by Guattari and Deleuze 1977), who identified three basic affects: joy, sadness, and desire. If joy and sadness are consequences of experiences, it is in the emergence of desires that it is possible to grasp the projection into the future that is necessary to foresee new digital technologies. In relation to the second task, the declination of affect for the design of CI4CG technologies, our proposal is oriented toward framing the technology–democracy relationship on the basis of people’s desires.Footnote 6 To make the connection between people’s desires and the technology–democracy relationship possible, we leveraged on Dahlberg’s (2011) analysis of the technology–democracy relationship, and his outline of four theoretical positions able to account for such relationship: liberal-consumer, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomous Marxism.Footnote 7 According to Dahlberg, these four positions differ in terms of the democratic subject assumed, the conceptualization of democratic relations, and the relevant affordances of digital technologies (Table 1). If the reference to the democratic subject is relevant for the communication of design projects, the forms of relations and the technological affordances can play a significant role in the conceptual design of digital technologies. This is the second pillar of our methodological proposal: to connect people’s desires and the technology–democracy relationship.

Table 1 A summary of four positions, adapted from Dahlberg (2011)
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To elicit people’s desires in relation to the technology–democracy relationship, we have created four positioning cards, which summarize Dahlberg’s four positions. These cards have been used, accordingly to our two pillars, in interviews or focus groups and they reflect the technology–democracy relationship.

The texts we produced exclude the labels used by Dahlberg to avoid affective reactions to explicitly political wording. To validate the accuracy of our texts, we involved three established researchers with different backgrounds (interaction design, computer science, and social informatics) and asked them to individually read Dahlberg’s paper and the cards, without the labels, and to point to the association between our summaries and Dahlberg’s positions. We reached full consensus among all of them on the accuracy of our summaries.

We used the cards during four ongoing projects involving the design of collaborative digital platforms, which are part of our effort to engage in public design. These projects tackle the themes of dyslexia, precarious academic work, political think tanks, and poverty.

The four projects we are referring to are named SPAZIOd, GARCIA, ThinkDigiTank, and PIE News. SPAZIOd was a 1-year public design project aimed at supporting public formation in a region in Northern Italy. The project involved a large amount of people in the organization of activities, and in the production of different computational and design artefacts. Some of them can be referred to as Critical Design artefacts since they challenged an existing narrative of dyslexia as a disorder for an alternative one of dyslexia as a characteristic and fostered cooperative activism (Menendez-Blanco et al. 2016). In this context, cooperative activism refers to the actions and practices which bring together heterogeneous groups of people who are dedicated to a political agenda through interventionist undertaking (ibidem). The project also included in-depth interviews with teachers, public officers, and parents (Menendez-Blanco and De Angeli 2016). The cards were used at the end of in-depth interviews and during a design workshop. Furthermore, GARCIA was a 3-year research project funded by the European Seventh Framework Programme, promoting gender culture and combating gender stereotypes and discrimination in academia (Bozzon et al. 2016). The cards were used during a focus group with the research team of the local university, while collecting useful information for the design of a website targeted to local PhD students and post-docs.Footnote 8 In addition, ThinkDigiTank was a 1-year collaboration with precarious workers in a network of Italian ThinkTanks, oriented to the design of a digital platform for the collaborative work of the network itself (Teli et al. 2016). The cards were used at the end of a focus group with our collaborators. Finally, PIE News is a European projectFootnote 9, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme, that aims at designing a digital platform oriented to support people experiencing poverty, lack of income, or unemployment (Botto and Teli 2016). The cards have been used during a design workshop involving all the project partners.

Specifically, at the end of interviews, focus groups and workshops, we asked people (N = 40) to individually order the cards trying to answer the question “when [ProjectName] will be online, and assuming you are going to participate to it, how would you like your participation to be described?” (Fig. 1 shows the cards and Table 2 summarizes the results of the data collection). Once ordered, the cards were anonymously collected into an envelope and then treated in an aggregated way. Concretely, when the envelopes on a specific project were opened, the results were put in a spreadsheet. Then they were weighted, meaning that numerical scores were attributed to the four choices (1 to the first choice, 0.75 to the second one, 0.5 to the third one, and 0.25 to the last choice). The aggregated numerical results for any of the positions were used to rank them in relation to the specific projects.

Fig. 1
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The cards as presented to people

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Table 2 Summary of the results of the use of the cards in three different projects
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The results of such ordering practices were used, in all the occasions, as a way to exclude elements from the conceptual design of the digital artefacts at stake in the third and fourth choices. For example, the limited role of the liberal-consumer perspective brought us to exclude affordances like voting or favouring competition among individuals in our projects. This decision was taken in the context of design processes that involve different iterations with the people involved; therefore, the positioning cards were used in a way that oriented the design process, but did not close it, following the concept of technologies as open and contested that is proper of participatory design (e.g., Ehn 2008; Storni 2014). To summarise, the results of the use of the cards were used as part of the multiple iterations characterizing a participatory design project and they did not constitute a prescriptive tool. For example, in the case of SPAZIOdFootnote 10, the narrative emerging was a mix of counter-publics and autonomous perspectives, pointing to the autonomous identity of dyslexic people, while still excluding elements specific of the liberal-consumer or deliberative approach, like voting or a pressure toward consensus.

4 Conclusions: the common, affect, and the future of CI4CG

Until now, we have been exploring a theoretical perspective and a methodological contribution supporting the design of digital technologies promoting the emergence of collective intelligence for the common good. In particular, we have framed the common good as the way through which the crises connected to contemporary capitalism can be socially challenged. We identified the concept of the common, as articulated by Hardt and Negri (2009), as the grounding for such a kind of intellectual, professional, and political engagement. Moreover, we have detailed how the centrality of affects (Massumi 2002), the pre-conscious reactions to the interaction between human beings and other entities (including other human beings), can be a good starting point to connect people’s desires with the common in the process of designing digital technologies in a participatory way. That is particularly interesting when dealing with design projects that aim at reaching beyond individuals in relation to socially controversial issues, what has been labelled as “public design”, an extension of participatory design (Le Dantec and Di Salvo 2013; Teli et al. 2015).

In this frame, we have detailed a methodological proposal that draws upon in-depth interviews, focus groups and workshops as a way to engage with people in the construction of narratives on the controversial issues. The construction of narratives paves the way to the accumulation of affect, which is able to open up spaces to collecting information deeply influenced by affects. In particular, we have described our “positioning cards”, which are aimed at connecting the induction part of the specific narratives to the transduction of general political frames dealing with the relation between democracy and digital technologies. The cards were used to grasp the general political options available for a project at the beginning of the project itself, achieving transduction on the basis of the induction stimulated by the narratives emerging during interviews and focus groups. Moreover, thanks to people’s involvement in the process of public design, the position itself was subject to changes, reflecting the different forms of accumulation of affect in relation to the project itself, an entity in transformation during the process of design.

The results of our explorations were quite clear in suggesting that the ordering of the cards did not convey a homogeneous image of political options, as the four examples indicated different rankings. Interestingly, one specific theoretical position, Autonomous Marxism, ranked highly in all the four cases; and, moreover, rational approaches, like the liberal-consumer or the deliberative, ranked generally badly. If in some cases, like academic work, we could expect the ranks that emerged; in other cases, dyslexia in particular, the results were surprising. Certainly, a deeper analysis is needed, although it is outside the scope of this paper, but such preliminary results comfort us both in our general theoretical approach and in the privilege we grant to affective aspects.

Following up on our exploration, we are pursuing a research program that poses at its centre the common, affect, and the construction of recursive publics engaging in forms of collaborative production. The CI4CG community of academics and activists certainly constitute significant social groups that are aligned with the general aim of combining progressive politics and digital technologies design. In this perspective, there are many questions that still need to be addressed, like the construction of mutually satisfactory relations with the ones who have been dealing with user experience in HCI (e.g., Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006), the ones engaging with the affective turn in the social science (e.g., Clough and Halley 2007), and participatory designers pursuing an updated research agenda for the field (e.g., Binder et al. 2015).