Community-centric engagement: lessons learned from privacy awareness intervention design

Visualisation and Other Methods of Expression (VOME) was a research project with the main objective of developing methods of expressing a wide range of on-line privacy-related concepts. Having built this wider vocabulary, VOME was also tasked with developing a range of privacy awareness interventions for both on and off-line contexts. Examples of VOME interventions include a card trading game, participatory video and embedded on-line interaction tools. In order to develop these interventions, VOME conducted a range of user-centric and participatory design engagements in communities across the UK. Engagements included: think-out-loud technology evaluations, participatory video development, “show and tell” family workshops, participatory theatre and community art collage building. Within each of these engagements, the project used qualitative social research to ground the design of its interventions. The communities in which VOME engaged represented a broad range of social and economic demographics and demonstrated varying levels of digital literacy. During its three and half years of engagement, VOME built up a rich set of lessons learned from using such a wide range of engagement approaches. The lessons learned address a number of key topics: tension of engagement control between participants and researchers, importance of appropriately situating the engagement and limitation of participant segmentation. This short paper outlines VOME’s key findings within each of these topics.