To cite, please use: Andrea Botero and Joanna Saad-Sulonen. 2008. Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008 (PDC '08). Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 266- 269. Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. Andrea Botero Joanna Saad-Sulonen abotero@taik.fi jsaadsu@taik.fi Media Lab - University of Art and Design Helsinki Hämeentie 135C (00560) Helsinki- Finland ABSTRACT This paper explores issues of participation in urban life, particularly new partnerships between city and citizens to co-design new services for their cities. We will share experiences from working on the design and development of a software infrastructure, Urban Mediator, and its related social practices. We conclude by pointing out the necessity of considering the software artifacts designed as being part of a toolkit for co-design that can enhance conversations between cities and citizens, and enable the envisioning of new practices related to city-citizen interactions. Keywords co-design, social practices, e-goverment, citizen-driven innovations, user innovation INTRODUCTION The following work is part of the ICING project (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) a larger initiative funded by the European Union, aimed at exploring, through a series of ICT solutions, what “innovative cities” could mean [5]. Case studies in key regeneration districts of Barcelona, Dublin and Helsinki, as well as the development of a system (Complete ICING System) are part of the strategy. The particular theme in Helsinki has been citizen-driven interactions, and our role as design and design research partners of the project has been the development of components to explore this issue; our insights and research are condensed in the concept of Urban Mediator (UM) that is the main theme of this paper. Citizen-driven interactions as a starting point The emergence of new Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) is said to be transforming the ways in which civil society and citizens interact with each other, and with the official systems of representation [2,3]. Today there is a vast array of government initiatives that aim to increase, often from a top-down approach, public participation and electronic government. At the same time, there is increasing interest in understanding the limits encountered by these approaches. Parallel to the official administration’s initiatives, there are also subtler citizen and community-driven initiatives emerging from the widespread use of new networking and user-driven content production practices in technology-savvy circles. Some examples of this trend are to be found e.g. in popular photo-sharing sites, where a big proportion of the media shared shows urban-related themes. [8] Other examples are evident in the increasing popularity of map mashups, made possible with open access to online maps, and the use of GPS-enabled devices for attaching location data to media produced. All this has triggered the emergence of new interesting practices of documenting urban environments in general. Concrete cases of citizens’ initiatives towards their cities, supported by new forms of media, range from collaborative projects to create a body of free and publicly accessible map data (e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org), to civic platforms for reporting problems to fix in a neighborhood (e.g. http://www.fixmystreet.com/), and to the use of social networking sites for creating and supporting civic action (e.g: Save Sloane Square group at http://www.facebook.com). It seems that more people are engaging in new practices for exploring, discussing and understanding their cities, through infrastructures not necessarily provided by the city administration, nor connected to it. Is it useful to consider these examples as forms of potential innovations for new citizen-city interactions? Are they worth following, learning from and perhaps supporting in an "innovative" city? In innovation management literature,