Civic tech, also referred to as digital civics in HCI, designates efforts to use technology to bring together citizens, bring governments closer to citizens, or improve public service infrastructure. Such sociotechnical encounters are meant to address public needs and increase interactions and information flows between citizens and/or authorities. In this sense, they represent efforts to bolster democratic participation and oversight. Yet, despite the importance of these goals and due to their inherent complexity, civic tech initiatives are often discontinued, leading to a considerable loss of public investment and energy and contributing to a sense of failure. To be sure, this is a global phenomenon: While civic tech initiatives emerge at different places in the world, they are often confronted with the same or very similar impediments. But because of the sense of failure felt by those involved, there are few opportunities to openly discuss discontinuation. Events and academic conferences dedicated to civic tech often foreground short-term success stories and published research papers, and so HCI practitioners and researchers miss opportunities to consider long-term perspectives and slower, ongoing (democratic) transformation processes. What we suggest here, therefore, is that failure and discontinuation should also be seen as productive learning opportunities.@en

Social sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic in design practice, calling for more contextual perspectives on the process of design for social sustainability. This paper presents a retrospective case study analyzing the design process of a serious game which aimed to empower teenagers to organize events to strengthen community bonds. The community context in which the collaborative project took place underwent significant contextual changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis using the Ecologies of Contestation framework shows the influence of multiple contextual levels (Socio-cultural, Power, Constructed, and Values-based) on the design process. Moreover, the paper discusses multiple contextual factors which influenced the design process and presents four suggestions for designers to anticipate and benefit from dynamics in these contextual elements. The suggestions regard (1) integrating the temporal dimension in the collaborative design processes, (2) carefully considering (value) alignment between actors, (3) leveraging values in the collaborative design process, and (4) acknowledging and responding to the multilayered nature of communities throughout the design process. As such, this paper explores the relationships between the community context and the collaborative design process to contribute to more resilient design practices.@en