Co-Designing with Multiple Stakeholders and Datasets: A Community-Centered Process to Understand Youth Deviance in the Italian City of Turin

TL;DR

This paper details the co-design and evaluation of a civic data tool in Turin, created through participatory methods with multiple stakeholders to address youth deviance, emphasizing collaborative analysis and community engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a community-centered co-design process for civic technology that integrates multi-stakeholder collaboration and participatory design to tackle complex social issues.

Findings

Stakeholders valued inclusive design and data collaboration.

Barriers included communication, data literacy, and coordination.

Political support was crucial for success.

Abstract

This paper presents the co-design and design evaluation of Sbocciamo Torino civic tool, which helps understand and act upon the issues of youth deviance in the Italian city of Turin through multi-stakeholder collaboration and collaborative data analysis. Rooted in research through design and participatory design methodologies, the civic tool integrates a data dashboard, stakeholder committee, and structured co-design sessions to facilitate collaborative analysis and intervention planning. The civic tool was developed in partnership with municipal authorities, law enforcement, NGOs, and social services, and reflects their institutional priorities while centering community knowledge. We describe the iterative co-design process, including stakeholder workshops for design, validation, training, and evaluation. The civic tool's impact on stakeholder trust, collaboration, and decision-making was assessed through surveys and open-ended questionnaires. Our findings show that stakeholders valued the inclusive design approach and data-driven collaboration while revealing barriers in communication, data literacy, and operational coordination. Furthermore, political and institutional support was identified as critical to the civic tool's success. This paper contributes to research on community technologies by demonstrating how civic tools can be collaboratively developed to navigate wicked social problems through participatory design.