In the context of the participation society, roles and expectations of citizens and municipalities are vastly changing. While designers and design researchers explore the potentials of apps to empower citizens, municipalities are interested in data dashboards—accompanied by applications and community platforms—to increase civic participation in public (space) issues. In this paper, relevant criteria and design decisions are discussed through reflecting on the lessons learned from two civic apps that were designed by the authors and analysing prominent existing civic apps that have citizen empowerment as their objective.
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Reflection is considered necessary and beneficial within career learning and is deemed to be a condition for successful career-identity development. Indeed, reflection is generally seen as a key competency in learning how to respond effectively to a complex and dynamic post-modern world in which individuals are increasingly exposed to risk. Paradoxically however, reflection can itself form a risk when it results in rumination. It is therefore important to identify the conditions and personal (risk) factors that make reflection a detrimental or beneficial activity and to identify elements within career learning interventions that promote benefit. The purpose here is to increase awareness about reflective versus ruminative processes and promote responsible use of interventions that aim to stimulate reflection in the process of career-identity formation. Based on the “career writing” method, the authors conclude that a successful career intervention must especially provide good facilitation and a safe holding environment. https://doi.org/10.1177/1038416216670675 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/
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In Amsterdam and Beirut, Abdallah has ethnographically researched interactional dynamics between disadvantaged young people, regarding experiences of success, in settings of education, work, sports, and music. He analyzed how focus, mood, and bodily deployment produced shared symbols, emotional contagions, and situated solidarities and moralities.He came to characterize constructive interactions as a main context for young people to experience three components of success: boosts, elevation, and grounding. Combinations of these experiences have important restorative effects for young people who suffer from an abundance of adversity and discouragement. Tensions arise for young people between, on the one hand, their loyalties toward old settings of belonging with their short-term, at times destructive, tendencies and, on the other hand, their success in new settings which demanded of them new types of discipline and commitments. Continued success depends partly on young people’s abilities, but more so on the availability of constructive interaction rituals helping them manage such tensions, without necessarily committing to one loyalty over the other. Next to young people’ s dynamics and processes, Abdallah has focused on the input of NGO professionals and volunteers in such constructive interactions to learn how their involvement can help young people in their struggles for success.The analysis employs concepts of sociological studies of emotions, such as interaction rituals, emotion management, and embodied dispositions to clarify how emotion, experience and energy act as driving forces in young people’s activities and development.
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