Technology offers new opportunities to support healthier food choices, particularly for individuals in low-income communities who face systemic barriers to obtaining nutritious, affordable groceries. We introduce a novel conceptual model of grocery planning that frames food purchasing as a multi-objective optimization problem that considers cost, nutrition components, and a consumer’s personal dietary goals. Guided by Zimmerman’s model of Self-Regulated Learning and prior research on food agency, we designed the Food Information System, a planning tool that provides optimized product recommendations aligned with users’ goals by integrating store inventory, prices, and nutritional data. We evaluated our system in an eight-week within-subjects intervention with 55 participants from a food-insecure community, followed by focus group sessions. While overall Healthy Eating Index scores remained largely stable, participants reported improved nutritional awareness and greater perceived agency in planning and purchasing groceries. We discuss design implications to support food agency by promoting long-term food literacy and by enhancing autonomy in making food choices.

This study investigates the dynamics of peer-to-peer support exchange (P2P SE) in non-monetized sharing economies. Utilizing a scenario-based within-subjects experiment with 93 participants across nine conditions, we examined how support request visibility and recognition for making requests affect perceived social costs of seeking help. We also explored the interplay between these social costs, community belonging, and confidence in giving and getting support in shaping future participation intentions. Our findings revealed that participants often leveraged different strategies to mitigate social costs of seeking support, such as justifying needs to ask for help, using apologetic language, and offering direct reciprocation or compensation, diverging from the ideals of non-monetized P2P SE. However, we found that receiving recognition for making requests, particularly from helpers, effectively reduces social cost concerns. We also discovered that interventions to strengthen a sense of community belonging and confidence in giving support should be prioritized to enhance future participation intentions. Our study offers insights for designing platforms to enhance participation and achieve critical mass in non-monetized sharing economies, addressing key psychological barriers and leveraging facilitators of P2P SE.

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions exacerbated food insecurity in the United States. Government-led infrastructure was depleted as a result of a dramatic increase in the number of individuals requesting basic necessities and food aid, and grassroots attempts to alleviate the resource shortage increased. The Community Fridge movement was one of these initiatives that combated food insecurity and food waste. It consisted of local community members sharing surplus food with neighbors via a shared refrigerator placed on a sidewalk. We conducted semi-structured interviews with its 17 users to understand how they practice information, human, and social infrastructuring work, as well as how their core values shaped norms for managing refrigerators and surplus food as the commons in local communities. We discuss how the concepts of commoning and infrastructuring may complement one another, which can help design value-embedded interventions to promote infrastructuring practices that build resilience and sustain commoning practices.

COVID-19 changed society in terms of employment, food security, and mental health, affecting all segments of the population. Surging demands for a wide range of support could not be met solely by government-led disaster assistance that experienced breakdowns in the initial phase of the pandemic. The nature of the pandemic as a global, long-haul disaster necessitated sustained, diverse, and extensive civic disaster relief to complement government response. In this paper, we explore how civic disaster relief groups carry out online and offline coordination activities to engage different actors and their positive effects on individuals and local communities, drawing on interviews with civic disaster relief organizers and volunteers in the United States. We interpret our findings with the lens of coproduction that can increase the sustainability, diversity, and extent of civic relief efforts. We then suggest design implications for coproducing disaster relief and discuss the importance and benefits of involving stakeholders who are less likely to be engaged in producing relief.

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought forth wide-ranging, unanticipated changes in human interaction, as communities rushed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In response, local geographic community members created grassroots care-mongering groups on social media to facilitate acts of kindness, otherwise known as care-mongering. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the types of care-mongering that take place and how such care-mongering might contribute to community collective efficacy (CCE) and community resilience during a long-haul global pandemic. We conducted a content analysis of a care-mongering group on Facebook to understand how local community members innovated and developed care-mongering practices online. We observed three facets of care-mongering: showing appreciation for helpers, coming up with ways of supporting one another's needs, and continuing social interactions online and present design recommendations for further augmenting care-mongering practices for local disaster relief in online groups.