communi TY + cuLTure Forum
Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and
with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak
to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole.
Tad Hirsch, Editor
Community and Conflict
Carl DiSalvo
Georgia Institute of Technology | [e-mail]
as HCI and design research. An
important aspect of that explora-
tion is questioning our assumptions
about what constitutes commu-
nity, offering new perspectives and
tracing out their implications.

In that spirit, let’s explore the idea that conflict is defining of communities and that paying attention to this conflict is important, as it can serve to reveal the positions and commitments of actors within a community. To do so, I’ll call upon two examples from a community-based design project I was involved in, and then I’ll step back and briefly discuss why understanding conflict within communities is important to HCI and design research.

November + December 2011

interactions

We often think of communities
in terms of their commonalities,
defined by common interests, prac-
tices, heritage, or locale. We also
talk about communities as neigh-
borhoods, or ethnic groups and
their associated beliefs and rituals,
or communities of developers or
researchers or users.

But communities are not all about commonalities. Indeed they are just as defined by their differences. Heterogeneity is foundational to pluralism and also to democracy [ 2]. In a truly pluralistic society, difference is not absorbed or ameliorated, it is expressed. And this expression is often seen or experienced as conflict. In fact, we might say that communities are all about conflict. By conflict I don’t mean violence, but rather open disagreement, contention, and dissensus. The debates that occur in community meetings or online forums are productive for those communities because they give voice to differences and work to maintain the heterogeneity of the community. Debates are also defining because they make clear what issues a community believes are important—what issues are worth the conflict.

Defining communities by conflict
may seem odd or simply counter-
productive, but it’s neither. One
of the objectives of this forum on
Community + Culture is to explore
the issues and opportunities of
doing community-based work
To Pirate or Not to Pirate?
Several years ago I was involved
in a design research project inves-
tigating how robotics and sensing
technologies might be leveraged to
build technological fluency within
neighborhoods. At one point in the
project, radio was introduced as a
possible format through which to
communicate local issues of concern
(how we got from robots and sen-
sors to radios is another essay unto
itself). The crux of the idea was the
participants would broadcast facts
about the neighborhood—from his-
torical narratives to current pollu-
tion levels—and commuters would
be able to listen to these programs
on their car radios as they drove
through the neighborhood. As par-
ticipants explored the idea of using
radio they became more informed
about its technical capacities and
limitations. They also, very quickly,
became aware of its regulation.
Frequency is not free, nor can just
anyone use it. To establish a radio
station on a dedicated frequency
would require significant funding as
well as working through an extend-
ed permit process.