Además de los cambios en la forma de pensar, por lo tanto, uno podría esperar la creación de habilidades apropiadas para la tarea que enfrentan los diseñadores para la transición.

Los nuevos métodos destacan la investigación en las fases iniciales del proceso, con el diseñador como facilitador y mediador más que como experto; conciben el diseño como eminentemente centrado en el usuario, participativo, colaborativo y radicalmente contextual; tratan de hacer inteligibles y cognoscibles los procesos y estructuras que nos rodean, para inducir en los usuarios un alfabetismo ecológico y de sistemas; etcétera. Por encima de todo, volviendo a la cuestión normativa, existe un intento por construir visiones culturales alternativas como motores de transformación social a través del diseño.

This was their space, not ours. Later thatafternoon I found a cluster of neighborhood kids clustering around a young woman who was teaching them basics of programming. They were intently leaning on her shoulder to get a better view of her laptop. To my mind this image captures the gamble of civic innovation: participants sneaking community voices in and rallying around their concerns, hoping they won’t be just another wave of gentrification driven by technology rather than rising rents.

Put slightly differently, if we want civic hackathons to produce ideas that improve society, we need to more deeply and sincerely shape choices, thought processes, and activities that might make technology civic.

The baroque succeeded because it expressed something all Latin American people (Indians, Africans, mestizos, and even sons and daughters of Spaniards born on the con-tinent) had in common: the rejection of the domineering and distant center. Carpentier (1995) explains that to understand “Why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque?” we must look at the people and processes that allowed them to finally own the continent: “Because all symbiosis, all mestisaje engenders the baroque. The American baroque develops [...] with the self-awareness of the American man [...] the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo” (p

Civic hackers widely view machine-readable data as more useful because it drives a wider variety of potential uses, even as the shift from informational uses raises the bar to the literacies required to interpret it. In civic hackathons, knowledge of government operations was as useful as technical knowledge.