Concept-driven Design for Democracy: Advancing Co-creative Media to Support Citizen Participation and Democratic Engagement

Abstract

This article elaborates a concept of co-creative media that aims to support citizens’ democratic engagement by facilitating participatory and co-creative processes. The research adopts a concept-driven design approach to theoretically underpin and empirically inform the concept. This was accomplished by adopting theoretical resources from the framework of actor-network theory (ANT), identifying criteria in an analysis of existing socio-technical systems for democratic engagement, and building on the results from four research studies. The main contribution of the article, namely the concept of co-creative media, could serve as a basis for further theoretical reflections and a point of departure to support future participatory design processes where relevant stakeholders collectively contribute to the practical implementation and evaluation of co-creative media. Co-creative media have the potentials to provide citizens with a new approach to democracy and could broaden citizens’ democratic engagement by means of creating virtual spaces in which new ideas, initiatives, knowledge, and solutions could emerge.