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Leaving the wild : Lessons from community technology handovers

This paper reflects on two long-term deployments of community technologies, which we use to argue for greater consideration of what happens at the end of a participatory research project. Research teams worked extensively with community members to design solutions to local needs, intending that these products would be handed over to the community. This paper examines what steps were taken to make the designs sustainable, issues that arose at the point of handover and afterwards, and steps that might be taken to mitigate these issues.

This subject matter in itself holds considerable novelty: few research projects report on long-term usage of prototype technologies, and fewer still report on what happens when the research ends. We argue that this is an important and overlooked phase of research, particularly when the research involves close engagement with communities. This work is intended to provoke a discussion about the responsibilities of researchers operating in this way.

Our findings and drawn from two distinct projects, each involving long-term engagement with a community (four years and two years respectively). Both projects included real-world field trials of prototypes, amounting to thousands of individual interactions by members of the public. This paper thus draws on extensive experience and is able to contrast different approaches to the issue of technology handovers.

This topic is particularly important in building long-term engagement between universities and local communities. The steps highlighted in the paper aim to improve our ability to have longer-term societal impact beyond the duration of the research project in a way that is typically not achieved through short-term trials.

The paper was published at CHI 2013, the premier venue for HCI research, with an acceptance rate of 20%. It received a Best Paper Honourable Mention, placing it in the top 5% of submissions to the conference.