Samenvatting

The term Civic Prototyping is a shorthand for making creative prototyping accessible to anyone who tries to improve the world around them. This means contesting, hacking and innovating with technology on your own terms. This also means creatively engaging technology as a tool for supporting “democracy in the small”.
Technology surrounds us, and shapes our lives in ways we don’t even notice when consumed by day-to-day activities. In that, technological innovation continues to both solve and create new problems. For example, the Internet used to be seen as an enabler of free speech, equality and democracy. In the meantime it has also brought us fake news, misinformation, and increasing social polarisation. Newly emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, carry similar hopes and fears. What exactly do these technologies mean and how will they affect our daily lives? Can we control and shape them as citizens, or will they control us? These questions are difficult to answer, because they involve complex socio-technological phenomena that are impossible to predict. Civic Prototyping is all about giving everyone an equal opportunity to take an active role in shaping the unpredictable future.