Collaboration and Community: Foreword

This special issue focuses on collaboration and community to celebrate Colin’s passion and participation in the field of digital creativity and other communities, and his spirit of collaboration across disciplines and borders. Jo Briggs opens the issue by case studies of community-engaged digital production in a particular socio-political context in Northern Ireland. He maps the forms and results of collaboration between artists, academics, funding bodies, other stakeholders and the local community. With healthy scepticism on the actual impact of the digital heritage and storytelling production for communities’ cohesion, Briggs’ investigation of situated cultural practices creates a larger context of the cultures and politics of collaboration, through which we hope that the readers of this issue examine also all the other articles. The next three articles study digitally enhanced and/or mediated urban environment as a platform for community and collaboration. After a captivatingly described investigation of public park activities in Asia, Liselott Brunnberg and Alberto Frigo introduce the funfair design metaphor for placemaking by mobile devices in urban environ- ments. Yutaro Ohashi, Pihla Meskanen et al. report a study of children’s collective media production on the city of Helsinki. The artists’ statement by Andy Best-Dunkley and Merja Puustinen questions the power politics of urban architecture. After art historical and socio-political contextualisation of their participatory media art work RE/ F/r.ACE under development, they return to the same essentials of collaboration and community than Briggs: digital technology itself has very little to do with social cohesion/alienation, while ‘the answer is rather embedded into the long tradition of humanism: appreciation of social communities and relationships, and recognising the unique sense of subjectivity in the Other—in strangers and ourselves’. The final technical article by Pujan Ziaie and Helmut Krcmar investigates how this appreciation may be communicated in a design framework for online community reputation systems.