This workshop examines how innovative digital technologies can improve and reshape health, care and social services in more integrative, community-oriented, and ethically grounded ways – across different welfare and care regimes, and with particular attention to rural areas. How do institutional conditions affect local care provision? How can digital tools foster collaboration among diverse stakeholders? And how can participatory design and socio-technical approaches keep these tools context-sensitive and inclusive? Bringing together researchers from CSCW, HCI, sociology, social work, healthcare, public administration, and technology development, we identify both generalizable and context-specific challenges in digitalizing social services.
Goals
- Deepen understanding of institutional and contextual influences. Participants will share how national contexts – such as different welfare state and care regimes – shape the conditions for community-based social and health services, with particular attention to how these contexts play out in rural communities. Together, we will examine to what extent challenges and solutions are context-specific or generalizable across national boundaries, and how rural specificity reshapes assumptions built into context-aware HCI and cross-cultural digital practices.
- Encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. The workshop will highlight the importance of engaging researchers from diverse fields – including social work, healthcare, public administration, technology development, CSCW, and socio-informatics research – and equip participants with strategies to facilitate effective communication and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.
- Co-create actionable pathways for participatory design. Building on shared perspectives, the workshop will facilitate the development of design strategies and participatory approaches that ensure digital solutions are inclusive, equitable, and responsive to the realities of local care practices.
- Bridge theory and practice. The workshop aims to integrate results from sociology and healthcare research with a conceptualization based on empirical findings from the socio-informatics/CSCW perspective with practical, real-world insights. This dual focus will provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and solutions in the digitalization of social services.
Preliminary schedule
The workshop will be divided into two sessions: (1) identifying challenges and opportunities, and (2) developing solutions and roadmaps.
Session 1 – Identifying challenges and opportunities (13:30–15:30, with individual breaks)
- 13:30Welcome and introduction (15 min) – brief overview of goals, organizers, and framing.
- 13:45Impulse talks (15 min) – organizers present key challenges and examples from their own research.
- 14:00Participant lightning talks (45 min, 5–8 min each) – sharing research, practice, and local perspectives.
- 14:45Plenary discussion (45 min) – identify common themes, challenges, and opportunities.
Break · 15:30–16:00
Session 2 – Developing solutions and roadmaps (16:00–18:00, with individual breaks)
- 16:00Group work (60 min) – interdisciplinary teams (HCI, CSCW, social work, healthcare) co-develop approaches to identified challenges.
- 17:00Group presentations & synthesis (30 min) – collective discussion of solutions and insights.
- 17:30Closing discussion & envisioning next steps (30 min) – roadmap for collaboration and potential publications.
Join us!
Reach out to us with a position paper (two pages), that describes how your research fits to the workshop description.
Submit your position paper (two pages) to stephan.krayter@uni-siegen.de until 21 August.
Position papers will be reviewed on the basis of their relevance to the workshop and their content. We seek contributions that address topics such as welfare state research, social inclusion, participatory design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. If the number of submitted position papers exceeds the capacity of the workshop, the organizers will prioritize submissions seeking diversity among the participants.
For more information, please read the full workshop proposal. We are happy to see you in Siegen.