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This paper proposes social living labs for informed learning as an innovative approach to interprofessional and community education. It presents a new conceptual model and practice framework suited to rapidly changing, information-intensive work and social environments. The proposed approach is theoretically informed and evidence based. It integrates concepts from three complementary fields: Informed learning as information literacy pedagogy that enables using information critically and creatively to learn (information science); interprofessional education as a professional learning model with a cross-disciplinary and community reach (health sciences/medicine); and social living labs as informal learning context and problem-solving process (community development). After reviewing relevant literature, the paper introduces the concepts and research that underpin social living labs for informed learning. Then it presents a new conceptual model and a practice framework to guide their design and implementation. To illustrate the practical application of this approach, a hypothetical scenario envisages health practitioners, librarians and community members collaborating in a social living lab to address health and social challenges related to child obesity. The paper concludes by discussing anticipated benefits and limitations of the approach and possible wider application. As a contribution to theory, the paper uncovers a previously unrecognised synergy between the principles of informed learning, social living labs and interprofessional education. Supporting information literacy research and practice, the paper identifies a significant role for informed learning in community and professional education, and a novel strategy for health information literacy development. The paper is of interest to educators, researchers, and practitioners across information literacy, community development, healthcare, and other professional fields.

In this article, we examine the rise of contact-tracing apps during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic as a new form of technological solutionism – a technological or techno-social fix that can be deployed at national scale in response to an urgent, supranational problem. A dystopian view saw the rapid development and proliferation of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps as a vanguard technology for surveillance. Expediently deployed as a technological fix to the pandemic, contact-tracing was seen to threaten to transform a state of emergency into a state of exception, under which accepted or constitutional laws and norms might be suspended. Here, we extend early critiques of the contact-tracing app as a 'technofix' to argue the growing intervention of global technology corporations in digital governance and affairs of national sovereignty throughout the COVID-19 pandemic represents a new frontier of state–industrial surveillance that exploits people's pre-investment in and dependence on technology corporations. We exemplify this with the 'technofix' of the Google–Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework and critically examine the notion of a decentralised and privacy-preserving Bluetooth-based contact-tracing framework proposed by global technology corporations that may threaten state sovereignty when determining public health responses to current or future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settlers of colour occupy a liminal space in the settler colony of Australia, and this liminality was exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through the literature on digital activism, technological immersion, and placemaking, this paper explores Radical Placemaking as a route for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people based in Brisbane to stake their right to the city through alternative digitised modalities. Three projects using situated digital stories were created: (i) the Chatty Bench Project; (ii) the TransHuman Saunter Project; and (iii) Chatty Bench Festival Community Media Visual Projections. We analysed the experiences of study participants creating the digital stories and eventual user experiences of the stories for their ability to provoke self‐reflection, immersiveness, and belonging through evocation and representation of lived experiences. The paper suggests that radical placemaking offers CALD communities subversive tactics of occupying space through emerging technologies without engaging in erasure of existing histories of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]