As outdoor recreations have grown in popularity post the pandemic, their effect on local biodiversity has been unregulated, leading to shifts in local ecology and wildlife. Recreationalists today use digital tools like mobile apps (e.g. Surfline) to facilitate and guide them towards nature spaces for these activities, highlighting opportunities for these apps to ameliorate the effects of these interactions through alternative design goals and values. By centering our design around the experience of Otter 841 (i.e., “the surfing otter”) in Santa Cruz we study how existing research in environmental studies and conservation can be used to create alternative design frameworks to improve outdoor recreation, for long-term sustainable interactions. By using speculative design centered on the “Tragedy of the Commons” defined by Ostrom and Hardin we create alternate paradigms of how recreational technology can shift interactions to center the needs of non-human actors for technology design.

Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim’s concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.

Technological innovations are often recognized for improving accessibility, but are also critiqued for perpetuating exclusionary practices in disability research.In the context of neurodivergence, these tensions are intensified by its diverse and heterogeneous nature, alongside the continuously evolving understanding and awareness surrounding it.As tech startups act as catalysts for innovation, offering technological "solutions" that directly engage with the lived experiences of disabled individuals, a critical question arises: How do the discursive strategies used by these companies reflect and construct broader societal narratives surrounding neurodivergence?This study employs thematic and discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 startups that claim to enhance the well-being of autistic people.Our analysis identifies three key thematic patterns in the corpus: fears, where startups emphasize urgency and evoke cultural anxieties; hopes, where they pin aspirations for empowerment and inclusion on technological innovation; and oscillations, where portrayals shift between different models of disability, allowing companies to address multiple audiences.These strategies not only influence how autism and care are publicly understood but also shape the design priorities, market logic, and ethical direction of disability-focused technologies.We call for greater attention to how language in disability tech participates in constructing the conditions of care and legitimacy in accessibility studies.

For geographically dispersed communities, including professional, academic, hobbyist, and fandom communities, in-person events and meetups play a crucial role in the function and health of the whole community. Building off prior literature, we take a nuanced look at large scale community events that blend online and offline interactions across digital and physical embodied experiences in order to build understanding of how this knowledge can be leveraged to build more accessible hybrid modalities for community events. Building on this foundation, this paper presents a comprehensive study using ethnographic methods to examine large scale community events, specifically stadium music concerts of varying modalities (e.g., in-person, live-streamed). Using a disability lens, we explore how such community events are experienced and technologically mediated, as well as how the community and individuals design and construct their own sociotechnical worlds across multiple modalities and embodied experiences. By centering the disabled embodied experience, we examine how community members navigate the concert environment, time, and the social experience of concert attendance. Based on our findings, we highlight the nuanced complexities of inclusive community-centered large scale, multi-modal events.

The isolating nature of platform-based work, particularly gig work involving deliveries, has created unintended consequences over how workers engage with peers, friends, family, and society in general. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 21 delivery workers in Bangalore, India to understand how workers experienced and responded to social isolation perpetuated by the nature and daily function of their work. We found that the stigma and individual nature of app-based delivery work restricts access to inter-relational and instrumental support. As a response, workers organized peer networks for both companionship and emergency assistance. We analyze how the cultural context of India heightens these experiences, and offer ideas for mitigating the risks of isolation as a result of gig work.