This study examines synthetic personas generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) and their implications, focusing on how these personas encode and perform gendering. Traditional personas carry implicit power and agency, making their accuracy and inclusivity essential. However, delegating persona creation to generative AI raises concerns about bias, representation, and ethical design. Poorly designed personas risk reinforcing stereotypes, marginalizing certain groups, and embedding biases into the design process. Using a mixed-method approach – combining direct inquiries with four LLMs and participatory workshops – we analyze gender bias in synthetic personas. Drawing from feminist theory, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), and Participatory Design (PD), both societal, normative, and representational biases were identified. As a result of this, we argue that synthetic personas should not be used as direct stand-ins for real users but instead reframed as objects of critical inquiry. They can serve as provocations—tools that challenge assumptions and expose biases in LLM-generated outputs. Furthermore, this study underscores the need to move beyond exclusively expert-driven evaluations by incorporating user perspectives directly. By doing so, the evaluation process becomes richer, more representative, and better equipped to identify biases that might otherwise be overlooked.

Digital Commons have been widely studied in HCI and co-design literature as an alternative to technologies produced by capitalistic corporations. In this paper, we present an action-research process that facilitates the use of digital commons among a group of participants. The process core aspect is understanding our participants’ interests and values to present multiple off-the-shelf tools fitting their needs. In doing so, we leveraged on Artifact Ecologies, using them as an action-research tool. The process is articulated in three main phases: 1) we engaged participants in a reflection on their Artifact Ecologies, connecting the artifacts in use to their values; 2) we used these results to selected valuable digital commons; 3) we presented these tools to the group, connecting them to participants’ ecologies. At the end of the process, we performed a collective interview to evaluate the process alongside assessing the adoption of the proposed technologies. Based on our findings, we developed five tactics to foster digital commoning.

Recent HCI scholarship has critiqued anthropocentrism in design as contributing to the ecological crisis. The current paper contributes theoretically and empirically to this area, adopting the lens of Socio-Ecological Relations, inspired by Environmental History and STS. We argue that a socio-ecological lens can offer practical tools to HCI and Interaction Design to overcome the separation between humanity and nature-as-a-resource. For this reason, our unit of analysis is humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, and we show how this double internality becomes visible using an historical and geographical approach in the design process. Methodologically, using Situational Analysis, we analyse an Action Research project that introduced a digital platform for community radio in rural contexts. We find that Socio-Ecological Relations, performed in specific places, shape the design process and are themselves transformed by becoming part of it. We provide a set of sensitivities for operationalizing this approach for design researchers.

This paper offers the related concepts of 'caring' and 'commoning', borrowed from feminist technoscience and feminist political economy, as both values for design and analytical lenses to scrutinize computer-cooperative infrastructures for activist interventions. The paper draws on the empirical work conducted in a European participatory design project confronting risks of social exclusion that result from precarious labor conditions increasingly affecting the European populations. We discuss how the combined concepts of caring and commoning present alternatives to capitalist accumulation, supporting activist and emancipatory aims by shedding light on dimensions related to work, affects, and politics.

This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities.

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.