[Workshop 4] Prototyping an augmented democracy situation room

The goal of this session is to fast prototype an Augmented Democracy Situation Room in the context of the Barcelona and the Decidim project. The idea is to be theoretically developed and practically tested as a proof of concept through three instances:

The first instance, THEORY & SHOWCASE (30min), will address the history of the control rooms to situation rooms and how a prototype of a citizen situation room looks like. The idea is based on the previous citizen control room hypothesis developed by hackitectura.net (DeSoto, 2009). In 2008, hackitectura presented a new critical concept for a situation room at LABoral art centre. The project was a media-architecture piece of speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2014). incorporating some open source elements. In formal and visual terms, the device evoked a conventional situation room.

The second part, BRAINSTORMING (60min) will inquire: 1/ What are the spaceware-hardware-software-netware systems of an augmented democracy situation room? 2/ What are the interoperable standards & complex material-information systems of social, human and “analogue” layers (gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, algorithms) as well as informational, non-human computational and “digital” layers of an augmented democracy situation room? 3/ How can an augmented democracy situation room be turned into an infrastructure of the common? 4/ How would it function in practice and how would it improve or build a new type of democracy in the time of surveillance capitalism and the rise of right-wing technopolitics?

The third instance, PROTOTYPING (90min) will consist of a real-life demo of an Augmented Democracy Situation Room using projectors and screens. What topics to address? How to interact with the many different realms around democratic innovation vs datacracy?