Designing Digital Involvement in a Datafied Society

In modern societies, datafication has fundamentally reshaped how we comprehend and navigate social, economic, and political systems. Data mediates power and agency giving rise to new innovations, open business and administrative models, and promoting social connectivity and participation. Simultaneously, in reality, datafication has increased societal inequalities and fueled challenges, such as exploitation, privacy invasions, or the spread of disinformation.
Digital platforms have become key venues for the positive and negative effects of datafication, mediating the involvement of citizens in political, economic, or even scientific processes. Their design, therefore, goes beyond the mere consideration of technical functionality; it is decisive for maintaining and improving democratic practices. This dissertation examines the design of digital involvement focusing on the complexities of datafied societies. Thereby, it targets two key contributions. First, addressing the increasing convergence of public and private, as well as economic and political spheres, it establishes theoretical and practical foundations to unite traditional research streams on participatory practices under a shared perspective of “digital involvement”. ... mehrThrough a two-cyclic Design Science Research project, artifacts are developed that define digital involvement, capture its diversity, and support practitioners in navigating the field. Subsequently, they are applied to the use case of citizen science. Second, the dissertation provides a scientific and practice-oriented foundation for addressing the implications of datafication in formats and platforms of digital involvement. Two experimental studies give insights into the effects of varying data representations and explore the design of tools, simplifying complex participation scenarios. Additionally, three mixed-method studies investigate opportunities and system design for skill-enabling and learning in digital involvement. Overall, the dissertation interweaves multiple areas of information systems research, including crowdsourcing, digital government, e-learning, conversational agents and immersive systems, integrating interdisciplinary knowledge from the fields of citizen science and data literacy. It advances the theoretical and practical discourse through the systematic documentation of literature and platform landscapes, the acquisition of empirical findings, and the development and evaluation of new design artifacts. As a key result of Parts I and II, the dissertation demonstrates interest and applicability of the introduced digital involvement framework in practice and its usefulness in cross-domain and domain-specific contexts. Furthermore, Parts III and IV highlight the need for a nuanced approach to designing and evaluating participation formats and tools in datafied societies and present possible solutions for imparting complex data and data-related skills.