Kamusal alanlarda anlamlı kültürlerarası etkileşimler için katılımcı gelecekler: İstanbul'daki göçmenler ve yerliler vakası

By 2020, 281 million people had migrant status, an increase of over 43 million compared to when this thesis started in 2018. Each day individuals decide to leave their countries, either voluntarily or forcefully. Fleeing a country is just the first step to making a life somewhere else, which comes with positive aspects and opportunities, as well as challenges such as avoidance, exclusion, and even violence. Therefore, anticipation is critical for making the most of migration and promoting social integration. Interacting with others in super-diverse cities is not always easy, much less for migrants. In fact, engaging in intercultural interactions presents extra challenges such as biases, lack of opportunity, motivation, and physical exclusion. Nevertheless, meaningful intercultural interactions are needed to support social integration and cohesion among intercultural communities and promote diversity in society. Due to its characteristic of turning current situations into preferred ones, design can promote meaningful intercultural interactions in super-diverse cities through new technological interventions. Previously, HCI researchers studied social interactions, with a focus on collocated interactions exploring how technology could support serendipitous, opportunistic, and emergent social interactions. Although these studies extensively examined how to start interactions among individuals, what kind of interactions are framed as meaningful and positive for the people involved and how these interactions develop has been less researched. Hence, how design could promote meaningful intercultural interactions between strangers is currently unknown. To this end, this thesis explores the role of design in promoting intercultural meaningful social interactions (IMSI) by following a participatory-speculative design research process. With this 5 approach, we identified design strategies, considerations, and implications for design to encourage these interactions with the support of technology. Additionally, by bridging the outcomes of these explorations with existing theories and concepts in respective fields (i.e., HCI, design, social psychology), we framed the design space that describes aspects of IMSI to inform and filter design decisions. We selected Istanbul as the location of this research due to its relevance for current migration and its location between the east and west, representing a unique super-diverse city. Accordingly, this thesis was driven by the question: how can design promote meaningful social interactions between intercultural strangers in public places of Istanbul? To explore this question, first, we conducted interviews, focus groups, and a collection of stories from locals and migrants living in Istanbul to unpack their perceptions and experiences of IMSI. With this knowledge, we characterized IMSI and identified design strategies to promote these interactions. After, we framed an initial design space of IMSI that we applied in participatory futures workshops in which participants envisioned potential design interventions to promote IMSI. Finally, reflecting on this experience and iterating the initial design space, we synthesized the collected data to ultimately deliver the expected contribution of this work, which is three-fold: 1) characterizing IMSI from a participant's perspective, 2) framing a conceptual design space for interventions to promote IMSI, 3) developing a set of tools and methodological implications for the design research community and individuals interested in promoting IMSI.