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.

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.

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.