Prototyping open digital tools for urban commoning

Abstract

The paper will discuss an experimental co-design approach to the development of a digital toolkit prototype and a resulting set of co-design principles, which are put forward as a way of infrastructuring future design of digital tools for urban commoning. Focus is placed on the case study of a commoning hub in a Parisian suburb where the toolkit was co-designed through a series of prototyping workshops, carried out with hub users and addressing key hub needs. The prototyping process explored possibilities for reappropriating and re-framing existing digital technologies as open toolkits, which can be further re-purposed by users, here and beyond, after the design of an initial toolkit prototype.