Recently, HCI scholars have started questioning the relationship between computing and political economy, with both general analyses of such relationships, and specific design cases describing design interventions. This paper contributes to this stream of reflections, and argues that IT designers and HCI scholars can critically engage with the contemporary phase of capitalism by infrastructuring the emergence of new institutional forms of autonomous social collaboration through IT projects. More specifically, we discuss strategies and tactics that are available for IT designers embracing an activist agenda while infrastructuring autonomous social collaborations. We draw on empirical data from an H2020 EU funded project -Commonfare -that seeks to foster the emergence of alternative forms of welfare provision rooted in social collaboration. In this context, we discuss how the necessary multiple relations that unfold in a project with such ambitions shape both the language and the technologies of the project itself.
Urban agriculture plays an important role in many facets of food security, health and sustainability. The city farm is one such manifestation of urban agriculture: it functions as a location centric social hub that supplies food, education, and opportunities for strengthening the diverse sociocultural fabrics of the local community. This paper presents the case of Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, Australia as an opportunity space for design. The paper identifies four areas that present key challenges and opportunities for HCI design that support social sustainability of the city farm: A preference for face-to-face contact leads to inconsistencies in shared knowledge; a dependence on volunteers and very limited resources necessitates easily accessible interventions; other local urban agricultural activity needing greater visibility; and the vulnerability of the physical location to natural phenomenon, in this instance flooding, present a design challenge and a need to consider disaster management.
The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the 'Commonfare', a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co-and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitallymediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co-and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by reasserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation.
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