UDesignIt: Towards social media for community-driven design

Online social networks are now common place in day-to-day lives. They are also increasingly used to drive social action initiatives, either led by government or communities themselves (e.g., SeeClickFix, LoveLewisham.org, mumsnet). However, such initiatives are mainly used for crowd sourcing community views or coordinating activities. With the changing global economic and political landscape, there is an ever pressing need to engage citizens on a large-scale, not only in consultations about systems that affect them, but also involve them directly in the design of these very systems. In this paper we present the UDesignIt platform that combines social media technologies with software engineering concepts to empower communities to discuss and extract high-level design features. It combines natural language processing, feature modelling and visual overlays in the form of “image clouds” to enable communities and software engineers alike to unlock the knowledge contained in the unstructured and unfiltered content of social media where people discuss social problems and their solutions. By automatically extracting key themes and presenting them in a structured and organised manner in near real-time, the approach drives a shift towards large-scale engagement of community stakeholders for system design.