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Paper short abstract

With the project "Digitale Daseinsvorsorge", we are currently exploring emergent communities of care in the German-Polish border region, and in the fringes of Germany's digital welfare state. Our contribution focuses on the design-based, co-creative methods we are using or planning to use.

Paper long abstract

The proposed contribution is a work-in-progress report from the T!-Raum AlterPerimentale project „Digitale Daseinsvorsorge“ (funding: BMFTR). The project is deliberately built around a set of speculative and design-based methods for exploring emergent communities of care in the fringes of the digital welfare state. The project is set in three districts lying across two German states along the Polish border. Here, imaginaries of care are transported through post-reunification narratives of de-industrialization, population ageing, broken promises of the welfare state and, most recently, the datafication of welfare that is perceived of as top-down, intransparent, uneven and lacking participation. Working with and sometimes against those narratives, actors from within local government, traditional welfare organisations, civil society and the private sector are developing new practices, socio-technical infrastructures and imaginaries of care. Our contribution details the design-based, co-creative methods that we are using or planning to use for exploring emergent communities of care.