Colin Watson
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
There is increasing interest in how digitalisation variously impacts different socio-economic demographics’ ability to access, and realise benefits from, public services. Centring citizens’ lived experience in the identification of harms and benefits is critical for the evaluation of digital services, and more broadly for responsible innovation. Yet this poses significant challenges, particularly when engaging those living in precarious conditions. This paper reports on a study that engaged citizens living with poverty (n=76) to articulate harms arising from digitalisation in the context of an e-government social protection service. Interviews and surveys supported by speculative scenarios of ongoing changes helped surface and express citizen-centric harm characteristics within wider ecosystems before, during and after access, beyond a narrower service-lifecycle viewpoint. Drawing on the findings, we develop a taxonomy of harms and discuss how this can be utilised by HCI practitioners concerned with responsible innovation in digital welfare contexts.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642562
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)