Aspirational Design And Messy Democracy: Partisanship, Policy, And Hope In An Asian City

Recent research in CSCW, urban informatics, and sociotechnical systems has proposed new framings and emphases of the city as a locus of research on computing and called for a heightened focus on the entanglements of social policy and design. Yet there are relatively few empirical investigations of actual policy-design entanglements in specific cities, and of those available, non-Western cities are underrepresented. We report an empirical study of the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo (TIFE) as a case to explore these urban informatics/social computing issues. Specifically, we offer an empirically grounded analysis of design as a mechanism of public futuring and debates, which contributes to a better understanding of "participatory urbanship" [6]; and we do so focusing on a non-Western city, both to ensure a broader representation of urban ways of life and also to de-center Western experiences as the primary basis of urban informatics theory in CSCW.