Scaffolding Young People's Participation in Public Service Evaluation through Designing a Digital Feedback Process

Abstract

Young people facing marginalisation often rely on publicly funded services for support. Such services must include users in improving their provision, but often lack the processes and tools to facilitate this. The civic turn within HCI means that we are still tackling the complexities of community-based design research required to provide digital tools of relevance to public services. To address this, we worked with groups of young people to explore the design of a service evaluation process, supported by digital resources, intended to support marginalised youths to influence service delivery. Our findings demonstrate how the groups of young people participating in processes of service evaluation using our digital tools embraced the opportunity to express themselves. We also identify tensions from the social values underpinning the youth voluntary sector that impede their participation. We close by discussing challenges for community-based design and implications for digital technologies that facilitate the participation of marginalised young people in civic processes.