Emerging digital practices of communities (ADIK) (Arjen digitalisoituvat kaytannot in Finnish) ADIK, was a research project of the Arki research group in the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki (TAIK) that runed from 2004 until 2007.

An important aim of the project was to understand different ways in which new digital tools give room to the emergence of new practices and, conversely, how people through their practices transform and complement these new tools.
To reach these goals the project explored various community practices and how they evolve in interaction with the rapid development of digital technology.
During the course of the project several product and services concepts for home and community applications were developed and evaluated through scenarios, workshops, demonstrations and pilots in close collaboration with different communities of interest.

Why Practices?

By focusing on practices we wanted to bring forward important dimensions to R&D of new technologies:

A. The existence of an ecosystem of practices and technological configurations in which new products should become part (be good citizens) if they are to be successfully taken on board in the everyday life of people.
B. We chose to do the study in the context of communities, and not single users; the main hypothesis being that the life of every community includes shared forms of activity and communal resources around which community endeavors are organized and mediated and mutual relationships are created along with particular forms of practice that would be easy to articulate and discover in a group.
C. The tool aspect points at the role of technology in making possible practices, and the importance of making them "co-designable by the widest possible amount of stakeholders.
By raising up these aspects our aim is to inquiry into possible ways in which social processes of innovation -manifested by the new practices communities develop- can influence R&D, as opposed to only technological innovations (See original ADIK project research plan 2003).

The following list summarizes the practices that were explored in the project, these practices were not defined from the beginning but rather were discovered as the project developed.
- Remembering lived experiences: looking back, keeping records, archiving (Remembering, Storytelling, Archiving, Keeping diary, keeping note-books)
- Coordinating everyday: performing and organizing tasks (Time-management: coordination, reservations, Remembering and reminding, Resources: shopping, Safety/security: practices)
- Giving a voice: being in touch, expressing oneself (Sharing, Storytelling, Communicating)


Project Timeline and Activities

The diagram summarizes different milestones of the project and the interactions between the exploration of themes and concepts with the development of concepts and building of prototypes.



Partners

The projects was funded by TEKES the Finnish National Technlogy Development Fund along with NOKIA and ELISA

For more information please contact abotero[at]taik.fi