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This paper illustrates the multifaceted aspects of caring practices, and the ways they are entangled with the organizing of community-driven initiatives. Highlighting the situated inter-dependencies between concerns for care and efficiency, and considering caring practices as essential to the practical work that makes communities work, we reflect on how caring and efficiency rationalities frame the use, and scope the design of digital technologies. Drawing on two cases, the analysis shows the ways in which digital technologies oftentimes overshadow communities' key concerns for care, and how attempts to design for community settings can result in anti-designs, that is sociotechnical configurations that can disrupt caring practices. The contribution of the paper is twofold: first, an analysis of the different configurations of caring and efficiency and, second, a focus on care in the design and appropriation of technologies into this space.

This paper illustrates the work of creating, infrastructuring, and organising a food-sharing community from the ground up. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and long-term engagement with FoodSharing Stockholm, the paper shows how the processes of starting up a grassroots initiative are shaped by participants’ direct experience and knowledge of other related initiatives. The analysis draws attention to: (1) how central activities such as recruiting volunteers, choosing digital tools, and establishing partnerships with food donors are conceived and organised, (2) the concrete challenges of sharing surplus food, such as adopting a distribution model and negotiating fairness, and (3) how governance and decision-making models are adopted and (re)negotiated over time. The paper shows the impact that previous experiences can have on communities' efforts get up and running and re-orients design visions towards the appropriation of existing sociotechnical practices, rather than digital innovations. The paper continues the cycle of learning by contributing practical guidelines to build, sustain, and infrastructure surplus food-sharing initiatives where configuring capacities, configuring sociotechnical practices, and configuring participation, are discussed as central matters.

Technological development and adoption are characterized by historical waves, reflecting both technical advancements and social transformations in mutually constitutive relation. Today, we are in the middle of another of these waves characterized, for instance, by the widespread focus on AI and other emerging technologies. In this context, activists and designers are constructively appropriating these emerging technologies, thus showing how socio-technical aspects of technological design, development, and implementation, contribute to ongoing transformations of power relations, life conditions, and our collective future. This workshop aims at bringing together CandT researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, promoting, and designing forms of sustainable appropriation of contemporary technologies by grassroots communities. With sustainable appropriation, we refer to a wider concept of sustainability including ecological and social aspects, as presented for example in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how - through the work of volunteers - surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community’s activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers’ concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events.

This paper illustrates design work carried out to develop an interactive theater performance. HCI has started to address the challenges of designing interactive performances, as both audience and performers’ experiences are considered and a variety of professional expertise involved. Nevertheless, research has overlooked how such design unfolds in practice, and what role artists play in exploring both the creative opportunities and the challenges associated with interweaving digital technologies. A two-day workshop was conducted to tailor the use of the ChameleonMask, a telepresence technology, within a performance. The analysis highlights the artists’ work to make the mask work while framing, exploring and conceptualizing its use. The discussion outlines the artists’ skills and design expertise, and how they redefine the role of HCI in performance-led research.

This paper analyzes the self-organizing network Hoffice – a merger between the words home and office – that brings together people who wish to co-create temporary workplaces. The Hoffice concept entails a co-working methodology, and a set of practices inherent in opening up one’s home as a temporary, shared workplace, with the help of existing social media platforms, particularly Facebook. We discuss both the practices of co-creating temporary workplaces, particularly for workers who lack a stable office and orchestrate flexible work arrangements, and the values and rhetoric enshrined in Hoffice. We collected our research materials through interviews, participant observation, and workshops. Our findings draw attention to i) the practical arrangement of Hoffice events, ii) the participatory efforts to get individual work done, and 3) the co-creation of an alternative social model that encourages trust, self-actualization, and openness. To conclude, we discuss how Hoffice is already making change for its members, and how this is indicative of a politics of care. We contribute to research on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) by highlighting grassroots efforts to create alternative ways of organizing nomadic work and navigating non-traditional employment arrangements.

The idea behind this Special Issue originates in a workshop on HCI and CSCW research related to work and non-work-life balance organized in conjunction with the ECSCW 2013 conference by the issue co-editors. Fifteen papers were originally submitted for possible inclusion in this Special Issue, and four papers were finally accepted for publication after two rounds of rigorous peer review. The four accepted papers explore, in different ways, HCI at the boundary of work and life. In this editorial, we offer a description of the overall theme and rationale for the Special Issue, including an introduction on the topic relevance and background, and a reflection on how the four accepted papers further current research and debate on the topic.

No abstract available.

Designing for mixed-reality performances is challenging both in terms of technology design, and in terms of understanding the interplay between technology, narration, and (the outcomes of) audience interactions. This complexity also stems from the variety of roles in the creative team often entailing technology designers, artists, directors, producers, set-designers and performers. In this multidisciplinary, one-day workshop, we seek to bring together HCI scholars, designers, artists, and curators to explore the potential provided by Design Fiction as a method to generate ideas for Mixed-Reality Performance (MRP) through various archetypes including scripts, programs, and posters. By drawing attention to novel interactive technologies, such as bio-sensors and environmental IoT, we seek to generate design fiction scenarios capturing the aesthetic and interactive potential for mixed-reality performances, as well as the challenges to gain access to audience members' data -- i.e. physiological states, daily routines, conversations, etc.

This paper presents a case study of an interactiveperformance that was produced and designed to encouragecivic engagement and reflection in relation to the socialtensions in a low-income suburb, mostly inhabited bypeople with immigrant backgrounds. The technologicalsetup in the performance encouraged participation bymeans of text entries that audience members could sharewith others. The analysis draws on the corpus of interviewand observational data collected, as well as the related textmessages that were shared during the performance. Weillustrate the different levels at which citizens make senseof societal issues they are concerned about, as well as theaudience-citizens’ perception of participating in such anartistic experience