Recordkeeping and relationships: designing for lifelong information rights

We describe an approach for designing information infrastructure that addresses lifelong recordkeeping needs for those caught up in the child protection sector. The challenge is to enable people to exert their rights over information as it manifests and changes through time over generational timescales. We conducted a series of participatory design and prototyping workshops over an 18-month period, with a core group of eight academic and community researchers. Using Recordkeeping Informatics to inform critical, rights-based, and trauma-sensitive systems design, we prototyped a distributed and participatory recordkeeping system that allows those with childhood protection experience to participate in their records. In this paper, we describe approaches we adapted for long-term participatory design in sensitive domains, and discuss the design artefacts we developed to capture the complexity of through-time information system design. We propose a set of design guidelines and discuss their implications for design work and systems.