Platform workers often experience isolation in their work. They use online forums to connect, but their moderation remains underexplored. Article 20 of the EU Platform Work Directive requires digital labour platforms to provide workers with a “communication channel” and leaves interpretation for how to design it up to the platforms. To inform this issue, we qualitatively analyse community rules and moderator comments across 28 worker subreddits. We show how moderators work to reduce harms such as racism and doxxing, cultivate their community through curation, and decide whether to enforce or resist work platform policy. The discussion presents implications for design for worker communication channels. The channels should be spaces with independent moderation and data protection-by-design that enable workers to safely build collective knowledge without fear of platform monitoring. Future work should follow implementations during transposition and test which governance and interface choices produce trust and capacity for collective action. Our contribution is to surface the governance dimension of worker communication and to translate these insights into design implications for future channels.

Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust automated methods to study the presence, design, and third-party suppliers of consent interfaces at scale and the web service consent-observatory.eu to do it with. We examine the top 10,000 websites across 31 countries under the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR (n=254.148). Our findings show that 67% of websites use consent interfaces, but only 15% are minimally compliant, mostly because they lack a reject option. Consent management platforms (CMPs) are powerful intermediaries in this space: 67% of interfaces are provided by CMPs, and three organisations hold 37% of the market. There is little evidence that regulators' guidance and fines have impacted compliance rates, but 18% of compliance variance is explained by CMPs. Researchers should take an infrastructural perspective on online tracking and study the factual control of intermediaries to identify effective leverage points.

In January 2021, WhatsApp announced an update to their privacy policy, sparking an outcry that saw millions of users install other messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal. This presented a rare opportunity to study users’ experiences when trying to leave the world’s most popular communication app. We conducted surveys in February and May with 1525 WhatsApp users from Mexico, Spain, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Over a quarter wanted to switch at least part of their communication to other apps, but 74% of them failed to do so. By May, 27% had increased their use of other apps, and only 16% used WhatsApp less. Beyond network effects, users struggled with making informed choices of alternative apps and with differences in their design and functionality. We suggest messaging interoperability as an approach to alleviate switching costs and discuss implications for HCI research and competition regulation of digital services.

Computing today happens across multiple devices, applications, users, organizational units, and in the rest of the world outside. Groups and communities come together for different reasons and operate within contexts that may differ from dominant modes of production and consumption. With a foundation in activity theoretical HCI, we develop the concept of collective artifact ecologies. This concept enables us to identify struggles of collective use of computational devices today, delimiting collective artifact ecologies in order to study and explain how they develop and overlap. Through an analysis of three empirical cases, we illustrate the notion of collectives and how they face challenges in establishing, maintaining and negotiating their artifact ecologies. This paper, therefore, contributes a theoretical foundation for analyzing groups and communities as collectives, with a particular emphasis on the multiple tools and artifacts they use. To serve as a starting point for further engagement with these concepts, we provide guiding questions to support the understanding of collective artifact ecologies.

CSCW holds a valuable set of notions and tools for future granular inquiry into the work practice on food delivery platforms and pertinent questions from the field of food delivery resonate with research agendas within CSCW. This argument is based on a synthetic literature review that identifies characteristics of food delivery work and connects them to previous scholarship within CSCW. With few exceptions, the food delivery workers in the papers included are typically young, male and of immigrant background. The work practice the papers describe typically relies on algorithmic management, flexible scheduling, pay-per-delivery, and while food delivery workers work solitarily, workers repeatedly organize in both formal and informal groups. Finally, the review shows that while these characteristics are common, the local environment where the work is done has a significant impact on the workers' practice, resulting in meaningful differences between places and platforms that should be considered. The discussion brings forth salient issues and outlines two alleys of future work.

Digital tools that support creative activities are ubiquitous in the design industry, yet practitioners appear to prefer pen and paper for design ideation. To better understand this exception, we conducted a comparative study between analog and digital tools and their impact on the divergent and convergent thinking patterns of groups of designers. We analysed how 24 participants solved comparable design ideation tasks in two conditions using linkographic protocol analysis – a notation method that focuses on identifying and linking small steps in the design process called moves. Our findings suggest that digital ideation tools yield more convergent thinking compared to analog tools, with no discernible impact on general productivity or divergent thinking.

The popularity of computational notebooks heralds a return of software as computational media rather than turn-key applications. We believe this software model has potential beyond supporting just the computationally literate. We studied a biomolecular nano-design lab that works on a current frontier of science - RNA origami - whose researchers depend on computational tools to do their work, yet are not trained as programmers. Using a participatory design process, we developed a computational labbook to concretise what computational media could look like, using the principles of computability, malleability, shareability, and distributability suggested by previous work. We used this prototype to co-reflect with the nanoscientists about how it could transform their practice. We report on the computational culture specific to this research area; the scientists' struggles managing their computational environments; and their subsequent disempowerment yet dependence. Lastly, we discuss the generative potential and limitations of the four design principles for the future of computational media.

New consent management platforms (CMPs) have been introduced to the web to conform with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, particularly its requirements for consent when companies collect and process users' personal data. This work analyses how the most prevalent CMP designs affect people's consent choices. We scraped the designs of the five most popular CMPs on the top 10,000 websites in the UK (n=680). We found that dark patterns and implied consent are ubiquitous; only 11.8% meet our minimal requirements based on European law. Second, we conducted a field experiment with 40 participants to investigate how the eight most common designs affect consent choices. We found that notification style (banner or barrier) has no effect; removing the opt-out button from the first page increases consent by 22-23 percentage points; and providing more granular controls on the first page decreases consent by 8-20 percentage points. This study provides an empirical basis for the necessary regulatory action to enforce the GDPR, in particular the possibility of focusing on the centralised, third-party CMP services as an effective way to increase compliance.

Couples exhibit special communication practices, but apps rarely offer couple-specific functionality. Research shows that sharing streams of contextual information (e.g. location, motion) helps couples coordinate and feel more connected. Most studies explored a single, ephemeral stream; we study how couples' communication changes when sharing multiple, persistent streams. We designed Lifelines, a mobile-app technology probe that visualizes up to six streams on a shared timeline: closeness to home, battery level, steps, media playing, texts and calls. A month-long study with nine couples showed that partners interpreted information mostly from individual streams, but also combined them for more nuanced interpretations. Persistent streams allowed missing data to become meaningful and provided new ways of understanding each other. Unexpected patterns from any stream can trigger calls and texts, whereas seeing expected data can replace direct communication, which may improve or disrupt established communication practices. We conclude with design implications for mediating awareness within couples.

Application-centric computing dominates human-computer interactions, yet the concept of an application is ambiguous and the impact of its ubiquity underexplored. We unpack "the application" through the lens of non-standard knowledge work: freelance, self-employed, and fixed-term contract workers who create knowledge in collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders on a per-project basis. Based on interviews with fourteen participants we describe how: i) their economic value is intertwined with data and skills related to specific applications; ii) their access to this value is systematically jeopardised in collaboration due to the different application practices, preferences, and proficiencies of other stakeholders; and iii) they mitigate the costs of this compromise through cross-application collaboration strategies. We trace these experiences to common characteristics of applications, such as update processes, interface symmetries, application-document relationships, and operating system and hardware dependencies. By empirically and analytically focusing on "the application", we reveal the implications of the current application-centric computing paradigm and discuss how variations within this model create qualitatively different human-computer interactions.

Today's users communicate via multiple apps, even when they offer almost identical functionality. We studied how and why users distribute their contacts within their app ecosystem. We found that the contacts in an app affect a user's conversations with other contacts, their communication patterns in the app, and the quality of their social relationships. Users appropriate the features and technical constraints of their apps to create idiosyncratic communication places, each with its own recursively defined membership rules, perceived purposes, and emotional connotations. Users also shift the boundaries of their communication places to accommodate changes in their contacts' behaviour, the dynamics of their relationships, and the restrictions of the technology. We argue that communication apps should support creating multiple communication places within the same app, relocating conversations across apps, and accessing functionality from other apps.

We introduce Codestrates, a literate computing approach to developing interactive software. Codestrates blurs the distinction between the use and development of applications. It builds on the literate computing approach, commonly found in interactive notebooks such as Jupyter notebook. Literate computing weaves together prose and live computation in the same document. However, literate computing in interactive notebooks are limited to computation and it is challenging to extend their user interface, reprogram their functionality, or develop stand-alone applications. Codestrates builds literate computing capabilities on top of Webstrates and demonstrates how it can be used for (i) collaborative interactive notebooks, (ii) extending its functionality from within itself, and (iii) developing reprogrammable applications.