Design research increasingly engages with diverse forms of justice, care, and activism. Yet, the implications for interactive technologies that benefit beyond human-centric interactions remain limited. This paper examines community animal rights activism in Türkiye against silencing during a period of systematic removal of community animals from public space, forced by the introduction of a new national law. Our contribution is the rationale for participants’ activism, driven by their collective and individual struggles against the silencing of multispecies neighbourhoods. The Turkish context provides a critical case for HCI and design, while animals in Türkiye are naturally accepted as urban co-inhabitants, and the everyday practices of multispecies care, negotiation, and coexistence have been core to neighbourhood life. Through twelve interviews, we examined how rights advocacy and collective action are practised for community animals in urban neighbourhoods and proposed an agenda to translate these learnings into tech-driven design intervention practices through co-creative potentials.

This pictorial invites designers to recognise the city from the animals’ perspective. We conduct a photo-visual exploration of the tangible and embodied interactions between animals and urban actors in selected urban and peri-urban environments in Türkiye. We observe and cluster the existing interactions to discuss how human-centred urban spaces can be redesigned for/with stray animals in order to build equitable cohabitation for stray animals. With the resulting five themes from photographic documentation, we specify how stray animals build relationships with the city and its actors. We conclude with the potential roles of technology and design in equitable city-making with stray animals.

A growing body of literature on mixed-ability teams within HCI investigates how disabled and non-disabled people collaborate. Still, how different disabilities can interact in a mixed-ability team is underexplored, especially for long commitments and in non-western contexts. As an emerging perspective in accessibility studies in HCI, disability justice emphasizes the importance of cross-disability collaborations. Collaborative access, interdependence, and cross-disability dialogue are keys to building accessible mixed-ability interactions. We conducted ten in-depth interviews with the members of a unique mixed-ability team (which includes people with different physical disabilities) using the same workspace with cross-disability interactions in Turkey. We aim to understand the requirements for an accessible mixed-ability virtual workspace and to identify practical design considerations for cross-disability solidarity-oriented virtual collaboration tools. To ensure equal access in virtual workspaces, we suggest implications for centering collective access, balancing external power dynamics, and supporting language and cultural diversities.

Non-profit approaches in the sharing economy are proliferating in everyday life (e.g., tool libraries, food sharing collectives). They focus on promoting social, economic, and ecological sustainability within local communities. However, prior research uncovered emergent challenges of these communities that prevent their endurance and growth. Despite growing academic interest in studying these communities, designers found it difficult to effectively adopt newly generated knowledge in practice. Addressing the research-practice gap, we developed a translational resource for design practitioners to conceptualize new value-added features for supporting technologies in the sharing economy context. Specifically, we synthesized emergent challenges in non-profit sharing economy communities and key social and environmental sustainability efforts in design research into a familiar format for designers – the card-based toolkit to support generative design activities. Beyond introducing the toolkit, we offer a “how-to” guide for its adoption in collaborative settings.

Autism is a complex, life-long condition that manifests itself in unique ways in each person. Due to the complexity of the condition along with not having efficient and immediate social support, parents with autistic children often seek for and rely upon the information generated by the community (parents, caregivers, autistics and experts) on online platforms. We look into what parents of autistic individuals discuss on an online platform in Turkey, how they practice autism online and why those practices are important or relevant. Our findings show how parents cope with understanding and defining autism, and how they seek for empowering each other, and managing the everyday collectively under a dominant medical discourse around autism in Turkish context. Based on our findings, we extend the existing knowledge on collective and alternative ways of re-defining autism as lived experience and introduce recommendations on how those strategies can be integrated to design.

Social networking has a long history of supporting communities online. In this paper we are concerned with a specific community that has formed around free food sharing to save food from being wasted. Specifically, Foodsharing.de is a platform that enables consumers, farmers, organizations and retailers to offer and collect food. Associated with this is the Foodsharing Facebook group where broader community discussions take place. We report on a qualitative analysis of the Foodsharing Facebook group to understand its role in emerging and sustaining the community. The Facebook group is a place where the individual values and motives, socio-political discussions and mass media interrelate and create new social patterns through narratives and local community building. We present our findings as interplay between individual, community, organisational levels, public relations and media, the operational platform Foodsharing.de that enables local communities and the Facebook group where global ideological framing of the community takes place.

Many innovative methods have been introduced to support creativity in the design process, but results from idea generation usually don't include a documentation of the process. They rather concentrate on generating creative design solutions (design outcome). The aim of this explorative study was to follow structural relations of visual documentation and presentation in the design process. The study followed principles from existing idea generation methods (e.g.: brainstorming, sketching, collages). Additionally it introduced a visual documentation procedure (structural ties) to capture relations to pre-given requirements. 25 young interaction designers participated in the study. Initial results of the study have shown that documenting structural ties during the creative process is possible to some extend and it has two major advantages: It has a potential to make stronger claims on the scientific value of creative techniques and such structures can help young designers to refine their creative ideas in alignment with pre-given requirements.