Social sensors and post-pandemic communities. Introducing proximity sensing and personal data management challenges in design education

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social contacts, proximity relationships, and physical relationships have been subject to major restrictions. The scientific, policy, and design communities have implemented a number of initiatives to limit face-to-face contacts, avoid gatherings, and control physical relationships in order to slow the spread of the virus. These initiatives have led to the development of several social contact tracking innovations. Existing systems such as Bluetooth low-energy and GPS and new contact-tracing protocols have been used globally to detect and notify possible contacts with infected people, through the development of “sensors” capable of detecting social interactions and gathering situations. In this contribution, we present the case of the university workshop “Social Sensors. Design for post-pandemic communities” developed as part of the curriculum of the Communication Design BSc of Politecnico di Milano, which was designed to introduce students to the issues related to the use of mobile devices as sensors, both in terms of the new interaction possibilities enabled by recent technologies developments and in terms of challenges related to personal data, privacy and tracking risks. In order to reach such objectives, the workshop has been designed and carried out in collaboration with the “Data Science for Social Impact and Sustainability” research area of ISI Foundation, a private research institute with extensive research experience both in the field of computational epidemiology and on the use of proximity detection technologies, that was able to provide the students with the technological background and with the real-life experience. During the workshop, the students are tasked to design an application that uses contact tracing capabilities of mobile devices to facilitate community relationships, personal contacts, and social interactions. This allows exploring how mobile technology and in particular these recent developments can be used, in a post-epidemic context, to develop digital applications for local communities, to restore the sense of closeness and community, stimulate socialization and lead to the development of personal interactions between neighbours. The workshop development highlights the need for highly interdisciplinary skills in order to successfully account for the different components of communication, interaction, and digital design projects. The workshop results highlight the range of unexplored potential allowed by the development of proximity detection technologies as well as the potential risks related to their use in contexts of reduced transparency or poorly designed data policies.