The rapidly expanding rural community (often called rurban) is a new place for CSCW with unique sociogeographic characteristics that give rise to the need for adapted participatory practices. Socially Engaged Art (SEA) offers pluralistic and critical approaches to participative rurban CSCW to meet this need. This paper provides a case study of SEA-informed CSCW in an Irish rurban community. An online digital art summer school was delivered to young residents of Northrock using freely available digital collaboration and creation tools. Young people in rurban communities are navigating personal, social and political issues in a complex and evolving environment. In this summer school, SEA was applied to explore these issues through the creation and sharing of digital art on participant experiences and hopes for the future. The summer school hoped to promote critical thinking, confrontational dialogue and greater mutual understanding. We found that rapid creation and critique of a range of digital art expressions of social issues accessed nuanced and contradictory experiences, bringing them into dialogue with each other while supporting mutual understanding and new perspectives on rurban place and identity as they evolve. We propose integrating SEA into CSCW with young people in liminal and transitional communities such as the rurban to explore complex lived experiences in pursuit of more equitable futures and sustainable community expansion. We also draw attention to the usefulness of readily available digital and online tools in supporting CSCW in creative workshop situations.

Design probes, an essential research tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, are ancillary "personal" data gathering tools that enable researchers to enter the private world of research participants. This paper compares two case studies of design probes used during the pandemic for radical placemaking in hybrid digital-physical environments: Digital Art Summer School in Northrock, Ireland, with eleven participants, and Chatty Bench Project in Brisbane, Australia, with sixteen participants. The paper further expands on the design methodology of the probes and their deployment during the online radical placemaking projects. From the participant responses to the probes’ activities and interviews, both studies demonstrated that the probes fostered placemaking in digital environments during the pandemic. The paper concludes with three lessons on the potential of probes as a critical research instrument to enable creativity, build social capital and create bonds between people and places during uncertain and turbulent times.

COVID-19 has urged researchers to explore new options for distributed participatory design, as physical meetings and workshops became unfeasible. This situation posed new challenges but also opportunities, in particular with respect to engagement and inclusion. This paper focuses on distributed PD with Irish teenagers to support place-making during this period: to build relationships with each other and the community. In a two-week online summer school, teenagers explored a concern or highlighted a unique aspect of their local community and designed digital artworks in response. Activities and materials were designed to support reflection, empowerment, inclusiveness, emergence, and playfulness for participatory place-making. Analysis of the summer school provides insights and guidance on the design of online PD for engaging experiences, especially in the context of place-making.