Design for Civic Quality of Life Things

This paper reports on inquiry into the design decisions that shape how quality of life issues are reported and government service requests managed in a large and densely populated city in the northeastern US. In particular, we reflect on research data collected over 5 years investigating chronic noise disturbance. Our findings highlight the effects of design choices associated with centralized, single-issue reporting and formal, standardized measures. We discuss how these design choices have broader impacts with regard to trust and transparency relations, and provide alternative inspirations for infrastructuring ongoing design in use by drawing on a model of contributory technology that offers new insight into social computing and creative participation at scale. This research contributes to HCI understanding of design for service interactions that is applicable to digital civics researchers, and can be translated to other contexts.