’Democratic interfaces’ presents a design exploration into mobilizing the potential of the Internet for enabling newand more inclusive forms of democracy. Drawing on online deliberation research, the thesis argues that successful online democracy will need to facilitate open and informed discussion (deliberation) as a prerequisite for democratic decision-making.
The potential for deliberative democracy on the Internetis explored through proposed user interface designs for online deliberation software:WebTing, a tool to facilitate democratic assemblies for online communities; and the citizensconstitution.org website, a campaign for a more inclusive constitutional process in the European Union. Further proposals are annotated as a pattern language and documented as they appear in the design process.
The outcomes of this thesis work are relevant for the design and study of communtiy-enabling software, and in particular online deliberation and discussion software.
Methods used are characteristic of interaction design, including information-gathering, sketching, prototypingand usability evaluation. Particular attention is paid to the challenges of designing community-enabling software, and to the normative influence of user interface design on user behaviour.These considerations suggest a need for new design methods independent of the HCI tradition, focused on user-to-user rather than user-to-system interaction, and on a prescriptive rather than reactive design practice.