Towards Participatory Action Design Research: Adapting Action Research and Design Science Research Methods for Urban Informatics

This paper proposes a new research method, Participatory Action Design Research (PADR), for studies in the Urban Informatics domain. PADR supports Urban Informatics research in developing new technological means (e.g. using mobile and ubiquitous computing) to resolve contemporary issues or support everyday life in urban environments. The paper discusses the nature, aims and inherent methodological needs of Urban Informatics research, and proposes PADR as a method to address these needs. Situated in a socio-technical context, Urban Informatics requires a close dialogue between social and design-oriented fields of research as well as their methods. PADR combines Action Research and Design Science Research, both of which are used in Information Systems, another field with a strong socio-technical emphasis, and further adapts them to the cross-disciplinary needs and research context of Urban Informatics. Introduction: Urban Informatics – A Research Field at the Intersection of People, Place and Technology The introduction of information and communication technology (ICT), particularly the more recent introduction of mobile and ubiquitous computing technology, continues to trigger profound changes in everyday life. ICTs have entered and become an established component of our cities, infrastructure and daily environments. They have blurred the borders between the physical and the digital and reshaped the way people interact and communicate with each other. People’s interaction and communication patterns in everyday life constantly and seamlessly shift back and forth between physical and digital spaces. The domain of daily sociability and experience has become a ‘hybrid space’ (De Souza e Silva, 2006) – a space that