Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.

Access to justice includes mechanisms enabling people to have their voice heard, exercise their rights, and hold decision-makers accountable. This paper reports on an exploratory study aiming to understand Domestic Abuse (DA) survivors’ experiences of legal journeys through Family Court (FC) and Family Justice Systems (FJS) in England and Wales, and the potential for digital technologies to support their access to justice. We used qualitative methods including interviews and designed prompts to engage eight DA survivors and three Family Court professionals. Designed prompts enabled discussions and articulation of perceptions of socio-technical systems’ potential to support access to justice in FJS. Our findings describe challenges faced by survivors when accessing FJS, participating in proceedings, and living with outcomes stemming from Family Courts processes. We discuss opportunities for digital interventions in these contexts and provide design orientations for relational approaches to design research seeking to advance access to justice for DA survivors across legal jurisdictions.

Co-creation workshops are a proven method in the field of human computer interaction (HCI) to gather insights from participants and shape research and design of digital artefacts, also proving popular when working with visually impaired people (VIP). Current practices involved in running workshops can be ill-suited for VIP, whilst their planning and delivery can be challenging for researchers with disabilities. This report presents a reflective account, of the first author's experience as a visually impaired (VI) researcher of planning and delivering a series of co-creation workshops with a mix of VI and sighted participants. This account demonstrates how designed materials employing sound and spoken audio helped ease accessibility barriers associated with leading discussions. The report also discusses accessibility challenges associated with current data capture methods and how these pose barriers to VI researchers. We conclude with implications for future work aiming to design co-creation workshops that cater for inclusive collaborative spaces between VIP and people with diverse abilities.s

In a 'digital by default' society, essential services must be accessed online. This opens users to digital deception not only from criminal fraudsters but from a range of actors in a marketised digital economy. Using grounded empirical research from northern England, we show how supposedly 'trusted' actors, such as governments,(re)produce the insecurities and harms that they seek to prevent. Enhanced by a weakening of social institutions amid a drive for efficiency and scale, this has built a constricted, unpredictable digital channel. We conceptualise this as a "snipers' alley". Four key snipers articulated by participants' lived experiences are examined: 1) Governments; 2) Business; 3) Criminal Fraudsters; and 4) Friends and Family to explore how snipers are differentially experienced and transfigure through this constricted digital channel. We discuss strategies to re-configure the alley, and how crafting and adopting opportunity models can enable more equitable forms of security for all.

The widespread digitalisation of critical civic services in contexts of economic austerity, neoliberalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, has renewed focus in HCI on interventions to enable digital access for populations considered 'digitally excluded'.While digital inclusion (DI) practitioners play a critical role in this area, their perspectives remain under-explored in HCI.This paper reports on a series of asset-based engagements with digital inclusion practitioners in the North East of England.These engagements explored the values, assets, and needs comprising their practices and used these insights as design material to ideate strategies for future intervention.We contribute findings describing the complexities, contradictions, and diversity of digital inclusion practices and efforts.Based on these findings, we argue for a shift towards considering DI practice through the lens of care, and provide directions for future HCI research to support DI practitioners in doing care work.

In this article, we report on a 3-year endeavor that fostered 18 collaborations between academic and non-academic organizations to co-create responses to social (in)justice issues in digital societies. The projects and range of individuals and organizations connected to this program offer a snapshot of the state of social justice thinking within the UK digital economy research sector. Our analysis shows how the program’s constellations of actions enacted different modes of resistance attempting to reshape people’s relationship to power dynamics, addressing institutions and exposing systems, and developing and restoring values for social justice. We explore how these efforts invite nuanced understanding of what constitutes resistance in knowledge co-production endeavors and how they helped surface tensions at the intersection of agencies and the distribution of responsibilities. Drawing from our insights and experience, we discuss implications for HCI concerned with the creation of the conditions for social justice in our digital societies.

There is increasing interest in how digitalisation variously impacts different socio-economic demographics’ ability to access, and realise benefits from, public services. Centring citizens’ lived experience in the identification of harms and benefits is critical for the evaluation of digital services, and more broadly for responsible innovation. Yet this poses significant challenges, particularly when engaging those living in precarious conditions. This paper reports on a study that engaged citizens living with poverty (n=76) to articulate harms arising from digitalisation in the context of an e-government social protection service. Interviews and surveys supported by speculative scenarios of ongoing changes helped surface and express citizen-centric harm characteristics within wider ecosystems before, during and after access, beyond a narrower service-lifecycle viewpoint. Drawing on the findings, we develop a taxonomy of harms and discuss how this can be utilised by HCI practitioners concerned with responsible innovation in digital welfare contexts.

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

Supporting disabled populations and their unpaid carers through designing sustainable healthcare interventions and infrastructures, is an important, yet challenging, area in HCI research. We report on a collaboration with 23 disabled citizens, unpaid carers, and a care organisation, wishing to co-develop digital responses to challenges they face in the management of self-directed care budgets. We describe how leveraging participatory methods, including asynchronous and remote engagements, enabled the co-creation of a sustainable digital common-pool resource, used by over 5,000 people worldwide. This study contributes novel configurations of methods and tools for co-design with ‘seldom heard’ populations. Demonstrating how these enabled the collective articulation of what constitutes trust, governance, and responsibility, in the design of a digital commons, “MyCareBudget”, offering peer-produced care documents for use by disabled citizens and their unpaid carers. We discuss implications for HCI interested in co-designing sustainable socio-technical interventions with underserved and marginalised populations, in healthcare settings.

The role of HCI in informal caregivers’ lives has been a focus of research for some time. Yet to gain significance in HCI, are the implications of healthcare systems’ transformation into a personalised care paradigm, where citizens gain choice and control over the delivery of their care. We provide a first HCI paper to examine self-directed care budgets for disabled citizens, where care funding is controlled by the individual. We explore how digital technology can assist citizens, promoting peer support to create meaningful, personalised healthcare infrastructures. This qualitative study contributes insights from interviews and focus groups with 24 disabled citizens, informal caregivers and healthcare officers, to provide understanding of their experiences and practices. These insights highlight relational care, invisible labour, power struggles with authorities and how citizens seek socio-technical capability. We contribute design implications for self-directed care budgets and HCI research concerned with developing technologies that support this population.

In this paper we report insights from the design and delivery of a process that invited distinct groups of citizens to co-develop and apply social impact assessment criteria for the purpose of reviewing research proposals on HCI, social justice and digital technologies. We describe our process, designed to create dialogic spaces that foster critical engagements with technologies and social issues, cooperation and peer-support. In our findings we explore how people defined and contextualised social impact in lived experiences, negotiated and legitimised their role as reviewers, and articulated the value of HCI research for social justice. We reflect on the significance of involving citizens in the commissioning of research that addresses inequalities and social justice in technology design and draw implications for HCI researchers concerned with ethical dimensions of technology. The work contributes to HCI and civic engagement's traditions to develop effective participatory methods and collaborative processes to produce digital technologies that support social justice.

Configuring community technology to ensure its sustainability has proved challenging. We present a 3-year longitudinal study and evaluation of two independent situated community display networks in rural contexts. We describe how the design of the display systems evolved to reflect the needs and desires of the community. We report on the way stakeholders’ perceptions of the displays changed over time, and examine the community dynamics involved in the administration, maintenance and moderation of the systems. Drawing from our findings, we further explore the role of the community champion and their impact on sustainability and scalability. We provide recommendations for the design of community network display technology that supports democratic inter-community politics and governance, and is sensitive to the hidden emotional labor and social resources that are required from communities to fully adopt and sustain display technology.

Abstract This paper reports on a long-term collaboration with a self-organised social clinic, within solidarity movements in Greece. The collaboration focused on the co-creation of an oral history group within the social clinic, aiming to record and make sense of a collection of digital oral histories from its volunteers and volunteers-doctors. The process aimed to support reflection and shape the future of the clinic’s ongoing social innovation and to transform institutional public health services. Positioning the work of solidarity movement as designing social innovation, the work contributes to CSCW and ‘infrastructuring’ in Participatory Design aspiring to support social activism and social transformation processes. More specifically, through our empirical insights on the process of infrastructuring an oral history group within a social movement; and related insights about their ongoing participatory health service provision—we provide implications for CSCW concerned with its role in institutional healthcare service transformation.

Our food system is a socio-material, heterogeneous infrastructure whose complexity and interconnectedness often remains invisible to citizens. While moments of crisis expose the vulnerabilities and injustices underlying this system, this paper seeks to explore which processes and tools CSCW could purposely design to 'open up' food infrastructures and bring young and adult people in contact with different aspects of the food system to cultivate food citizenship from a more-than-human perspective. Through a collaboration with a local primary school and four different food organisations (a mushroom grower, a vegetable farm, a bread-baking community centre, and a food bank) in North East England, UK, we designed 'contact zones' that enabled a class of students aged 7 to 8 years to encounter socio-material food practices at each partnering organisation's site and in the classroom. Our insights show young people's rich engagement in the socio-materiality of place, food, and practices; how encountering food practices across very different sites helped surface the interconnectedness of the food system; and how the contact zones opened spaces to practice food citizenship. The paper offers design implications towards infrastructuring more-than-human food pedagogies. It discusses inherent power dynamics of more-than-human design collaborations, critically evaluates the role of technology in more-than-human relations, and presents three design opportunities towards a relational understanding of food.

There has been a growing interest in HCI in designing and developing technology to support democratic participation, particularly in the domain of urban planning or place-based research. In addition, the HCI field has increasingly considered the intersection of HCI and policymaking to understand how our research can have a broader impact. In this paper, we report on a series of workshops with citizens and city planners to explore place-based policymaking through the case study of neighbourhood planning in the UK. Our analysis highlights the tensions, opportunities and challenges faced by citizens in creating policy. Drawing from our findings, we stress the need for HCI to be actively involved in supporting, innovating and (re)designing civic policymaking processes while emphasising design considerations for the development of technological tools.

Work addressing the negative impacts of domestic violence on victim-survivors and service providers has slowly been contributing to the HCI discourse. However, work discussing the necessary, pre-emptive steps for researchers to enter these spaces sensitively and considerately, largely remains opaque. Heavily-politicised specialisms that are imbued with conflicting values and practices, such as domestic violence service delivery can be especially difficult to navigate. In this paper, we report on a mixed methods study consisting of interviews, a design dialogue and an ideation workshop with domestic violence service providers to explore the potential of an online service directory to support their work. Through this three-stage research process, we were able to characterise this unique service delivery landscape and identify tensions in services' access, understandings of technologies and working practices. Drawing from our findings, we discuss opportunities for researchers to work with and sustain complex information ecologies in sensitive settings.

Critical approaches to smart technologies have emerged in HCI that question the conditions necessary for smart technologies to benefit people. Smart services rely on a relation of trust and sense of security between people and technology requiring a more expansive definition of security. Using established design methods, we worked with two residents' groups to critically explore and rethink smart services in the home and city. From our data analysis, we derive insights about perceptions and understandings of trust, privacy and security of smart devices, and identify how technological security needs to work in concert with social and relational forms of security for smart services to be effective. We conclude with an orientation for HCI that focuses on designing services for and with smart people and things.

This paper discusses what infrastructuring in participatory design can contribute to processes of food system democratisation. It presents almost two years of engagement with a community-based organisation in a socio-economically deprived neighbourhood in England with the aim of developing a local food hub. It documents how the collaborative work shifted from setting up an infrastructure to ongoing infrastructuring of an enabling environment to grow and sustain social innovation. While the former focused on a technological platform and a business to deliver inclusivity, customer experience, and marketing, the latter focuses on building lasting relationships on three levels: strengthening ties within the community-based organisation, offering social spaces to connect with the local community, and with other organisations by forming coalitions with mutual benefits. We contribute three design opportunities: First, in order to infrastructure the formation of publics around food initiatives, we need to design for relationship building. Second, we point to design implications for ethical aspirations, participation, and system transformation towards a food democracy. Finally, we reflect on the sustainability of infrastructuring and the role of designers to work towards independent infrastructures.

HCI has a tradition of engaging in democratic practices and contributing to public service innovation. Working with complex socio-political realities presents significant challenges for HCI researchers, which are amplified by the current democratic and economic crisis. In this article, we present insights from a longitudinal study where we worked with multiple stakeholders in the context of an austerity-driven transformation of public parks service in a city in the North East of England. Over the course of 20 months, we developed a participatory socio-technical process designed to create collaborative spaces between communities and institutions to re-envision and re-shape the city's public parks service. The study contributes to HCI research concerned with developing tools and processes that aim at connecting across the boundaries between communities and institutions. Our process and the resulting analysis expose the practical complexities of transformation and co-creation processes and the troubles that come with opening spaces for wider participation within highly contested and political settings. We provide an orientation for HCI design research aspiring to contribute to social innovation and democratic practices in troubled times.

This paper presents insights from a collaboration with cycling advocates and local authorities to consider how HCI can open productive spaces for citizens to contribute to the realization of social goals. We worked with members of a walking and cycling advocacy organization to explore the potential for technology-mediated data collection to support advocacy and action taking. Based on our initial findings, we developed and deployed Spokespeople-a system to enable people who cycle to collect, curate and make visible their everyday journeys and experiences. We then worked with participants, cycling advocates and local authority transport planners to explore how citizens can contribute beyond data collection, by curating and prioritizing their experiences and exploring possible routes to action. We identify future directions for technology design to support citizens to make meaningful contributions to changes in the city through annotated routes, prioritization and community commissioning processes.

In this paper, we present a socio-technical process designed to engage children in an ongoing urban design project-Streets for People-in Newcastle, UK. We translated urban design proposals developed by residents and the local authority to enable children to contribute ideas to the project. Our process comprised three stages: situated explorations and evidence gathering through digitally supported neighbourhood walks; issue mapping and peer-to-peer discussions using an online engagement platform; and face-to-face dialogue between children, residents, and the local authority through a 'Town Hall' event. We report insights gained through our engagement and show how our activities facilitated issue advocacy and the development of children's capacities, but also surfaced tensions around the agency of children in political processes. We reflect on the challenges of working in this space, and discuss wider implications for technology design and ethical questions that 'scaling up' such work might pose.

This paper introduces the concept of 'food democracy' as a theoretical framing for HCI to engage in human-food interaction. Extending existing foci of health and environmental sustainability, food democracy requires thinking through aspects of social and economic justice, and democratic governance as directions for the study and design of technologies for alternative food movements. To exemplify food democracy, we report on field observations and interviews about the opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of local food networks with communities in deprived neighbourhoods using an online direct food marketing platform. Using a food democracy framing, we identify tensions around environmental, social, and economic goals; challenges of local food businesses operating within the existing economic paradigm; and differing perspectives on ownership and governance in the network. We discuss the need for HCI to design for systems change and propose a design space for HCI in supporting food democracy movements.

Solidarity organizations in Europe are committed to building a more socially just society through a better configuration of democracy, politics and economy. In this paper, we describe our efforts to contribute to the socio-political designed innovation of solidarity movements through the establishment of a research lab embedded in, and operating within, the solidarity economy. We describe three cases that span the polarities of everyday and expert design, and contribute to the scaling out of social innovations. We use these cases to exemplify the strategies and tactics that emerge from the ongoing negotiation of 'infrastructuring' work with solidarity organizations. Finally, we discuss how guerilla infrastructuring, designing coalitions, and spanning design polarities can contribute to HCI and design for social innovation more generally.

The financial crisis and austerity politics in Europe has had a devastating impact on public services, social security and vulnerable populations. Greek civil society responded quickly by establishing solidarity structures aimed at helping vulnerable citizens to meet their basic needs and empower them to co-create an anti-austerity movement. While digital technology and social media played an important role in the initiation of the movement, it has a negligible role in the movement's on-going practices. Through embedded work with several solidarity structures in Greece, we have begun to understand the "solidarity economy" (SE) as an experiment in direct democracy and self-organization. Working with a range of solidarity structures we are developing a vision for a "Solidarity HCI" committed to designing to support personal, social and institutional transformation through processes of agonistic pluralism and contestation, where the aims and objectives of the SE are continuously re-formulated and put into practice.

We present insights from an extended engagement and design intervention at an urban regeneration site in SE Lon-don. We describe the process of designing a walking trail and system for recording and playing back place-specific stories for those living and working on the housing estate, and show how this is set within a wider context of urban renewal, social/affordable housing and "community building". Like prior work, the research reveals the frictions that arise in participatory engagements with heterogeneous actors. Here we illustrate how material interventions can re-arrange existing spatial configurations, making productive the plurality of accounts intrinsic in community life. Through this, we provide an orientation to HCI and design interventions that are concerned with civic engagement and participation in processes of making places.

We present a method for the situated discovery and articulation of issues at the intersection between the politics of place making and city planning. We describe the construction and use of designed tools, such as historical political archives; counterfactual maps; and cards to invite situated dialogue between the social and institutional practices and mechanisms that produce our cities. Grounded in an account of the political as vernacular and embodied, our analysis advance understandings on the politics of design, and on the complex interrelationship between places and political spaces. We outline how HCI can adopt methods and develop sensitivities to support democratic practices and publics envisioning their urban futures.

We conducted a study to explore the values and qualities of 'grassroots documentaries', framed around the production of two parallel documentary films with a London-based opera company. A team of professional filmmakers produced one film and the other was an exploratory form of grassroots documentary. We studied the different production activities through observations, interviews and a reflective workshop at the end of the study and evaluated the resulting films. Our analysis reveals critical insights that could inform the next generation of technological systems to support user-generated video content (UGVC) production, particularly in collaborative contexts such as grassroots communities.

In this paper we present insights from an empirical analysis of data from an emergent social movement primarily located on a Facebook page to contribute understanding of the conduct of everyday politics in social media and through this open up research agendas for HCI. The analysis focuses on how interactions and contributions facilitated the emergence of a collective with political will. We lay out an exploration of the intrinsic relationship between cultural memories, cultural expression and everyday politics and show how diverging voices co-constructed dynamic collectives capable of political action. We look at how interactions through the Facebook page challenge traditional ways for conceiving politics and the political. We outline possible research agendas in the field of everyday politics, which are sensitive to the everyday acts of resistance enclosed in the ordinary.

We detail the design of the Department of Hidden Stories (DoHS), a mobile-based game to support playful digital storytelling among primary school children in public libraries. Through a process of iterative design in collaboration with library staff and children's writers we designed DoHS to support the potential for playful storytelling through interactions with books. A deployment of DoHS with two classes of 8 to 10 years olds as part of their regular library visits revealed insights related to how to balance the expectations of a child-at-play and the requirement to further develop their creative reading and writing skills. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create playful digitally based activities that encourage children to explore libraries and experience new interactions with physical books.