There have been repeated calls for more ecological approaches to Sustainable HCI, and for the inclusion of the sociopolitical, structural, historical, and geographical aspects that shape technology-mediated practices of sustainability. Contributing to this discourse, and drawing from scholarship on Law and IT, this paper explores how the law, technology design, market mechanisms, and social norms enable and constrain behaviours — that is, how they regulate them. We use these modalities to discuss two digital technologies: a gig-work platform mediating practices of waste transportation, and an eco-visualisation platform scraping sustainability reports of publicly listed companies. The analysis expands on the set of dynamics that characterise the relations between these practices of sustainability, technology design, and regulation. We conclude by discussing the relevance of this conceptualisation for HCI, specifically in defining the roles of designers as regulators, and regarding design for sustainability as constituted through varying entanglements of these modalities.

When designing with and for complex sustainability processes like waste management, it is crucial to understand digital technologies as entangled with broader systemic factors, including physical infrastructures and regulatory instruments. Within the case of organic household waste management, this pictorial aims at making such relations visible through design methods. We have used yarn to represent the different threads of these entanglements and defined specific configurations: tangles, knots, loose ends, and frayed threads. We discuss how the design practice of giving form to these entanglements can make complex relations between digital technology, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments more visible and actionable for HCI, and explore how digital technologies are – and can be – made to work within them.

We are again thrilled to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 211 papers, of which 192 were accepted from the January 2024 cycle, and 19 were accepted from the July 2024 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

We are again thrilled to be able to present the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community with an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, containing very interesting and relevant scholarship from its members. This issue includes 313 papers, of which 45 were accepted from the January 2024 cycle, 85 were accepted from the July 2025 cycle, and 183 were accepted from the October 2025 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process to select contributions of the highest quality advancing the CSCW field. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship across the years.

This paper examines the collaborative work of residents, housing associations, and property owners to manage household waste in the context of a multi-apartment housing complex. Framed within the feminist ecological perspective of digital environmental stewardship - that is, how diverse actors, motivations, and capacities producing care for the environment that can be digitally mediated - we unpack how the many involved actors work together to keep waste in place, maintain the local waste system, and call on 'responsibility' as a means to produce sustainable actions and accountability. We frame these practices of waste management within the mundane work of sociotechnical innovation. Borrowing from Jackson's notion of repair work, we weave together an argument for the novel and valuable contribution to CSCW sustainability research grounded in the everyday contingent emergencies of environmental care. We argue for approaches to sustainability that reflect both the work to maintain sustainability -not just to produce it- and aspects of the 'good enough', a locally and reflexively produced equilibrium between maintenance and repair. We conclude by discussing their relevance for the design of sociotechnical interventions that mediate practices of care in waste management.

Design is not neutral but involves ethical aspects, from addressing power dynamics to enabling broader accessibility and inclusion. In industry settings, design leaders can play an essential role in promoting ethical design by, for instance, setting visions, developing and advocating values, and providing guidance for design. Through co-design workshops with ten design leaders working in Sweden, we investigated how these professionals envision the cultivation-that is, the development, promotion, and dissemination-of ethically responsible design. Our study outlines what the participants regard as the main problems that stifle ethical design and designing, and how to practically address them. The findings highlight that design leaders consider the lack of awareness about the ethical dimensions of design to be one of the main problems. Additionally, they point to various strategies for addressing the problems, such as communicating compelling reasons for prioritizing ethics, creating inclusive and welcoming spaces for collaborative problem-solving and learning about ethics, and folding ethics into current practices. This could involve, for instance, adding the dimension of ethics to 'design critique' sessions, or re-evaluating portfolio reviews to prioritize diversity in recruitment. We conclude by discussing design leaders' potential for furthering ethically responsible design, and provide a practical tool, a design brief, to support this endeavor.

Waste management in urban areas is a complex process, encompassing a variety of activities (e.g., acquiring, sorting, disposing), actors (e.g., single individuals, waste collectors, condominium associations), and capacities (e.g., from household recycling stations to physical infrastructures such as recycling and sorting facilities). Whereas previous HCI design research has tackled problems with waste management from an individual, behavioral change perspective, we approach this design space through a feminist ecological design perspective of Digital Environmental Stewardship. Through a combination of qualitative empirical data and materials generated at design workshops, we outline challenges related to waste management in a complex of five multi-apartment buildings. We propose a number of design explorations addressing such challenges, and reflect on the generative role of the DES framework in framing design from a collective and ecological perspective.

The scope of Sustainable HCI research is expanding to include the broad sociotechnical and ecological contexts of computing. We examine the intersection of environmental sustainability, technology, and the law. By studying the legal dispute between a platform service that facilitates crowd-sourced waste disposal and the local government’s regulation of waste management, we step through an evolving debate on the meaning of care and responsibility for the environment. When faced with the municipality’s claimed monopoly on responsibility for waste management, the platform argues for the paradigms of individual responsibility, designing for user needs, and personalised and on-demand digital services. In arguing against this framing, the municipality highlights the gap between the law, its interpretation, and the idealistic values of technology-driven environmental care. We contribute to the framing of environmental care within Sustainable HCI as a locally constructed, regulated, and contested aspect of technology design and appropriation.

Abstract This paper illustrates the work of creating, infrastructuring, and organising a food-sharing community from the ground up. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and a three-year engagement with FoodSharing Stockholm, the paper shows how the processes of starting up a grassroots initiative are shaped by participants’ direct experience and knowledge of similar initiatives. The analysis draws attention to: (1) how central activities such as recruiting volunteers, choosing digital tools, and establishing partnerships with food donors are conceived and organised, (2) the concrete challenges of sharing surplus food, such as adopting a distribution model, and negotiating fairness, and (3) how governance and decision-making models are adopted and (re)negotiated over time. The paper introduces the term Collective histories of organising to capture the impact that learning from previous experiences can have on communities’ efforts to set up and run; and re-orient design visions towards the consideration and adoption of existing sociotechnical practices, rather than always aiming at novel digital explorations. We outline three emerging dimensions that can characterise “Collective histories of organising” as a concept, (1) configuring capacities, (2) configuring sociotechnical practices, and (3) configuring participation. The paper contributes practical sensitivities to build, sustain, and infrastructure surplus food-sharing initiatives, where these three dimensions are discussed as central concerns designers and other food-sharing communities could learn from.

This paper extends the literature on social media activism by foregrounding the invisible work of orchestrating it. We analyze the activities of a #MeToo group in a Northern European country and characterize the group's efforts to catalog incidents of gender-based harassment and discrimination as an activist, platform-mediated participatory writing project. Our analysis details the work of organizing this form of activism, particularly: 1) the editorial work that underlies publishing personal stories on social media, 2) the emotional labor that unfolds as part of this form of writing, and 3) the work of creating publics. By drawing attention to these efforts, the paper frames activism as effortfully driven, sometimes in tension with the platform or evolving value positions. We conclude with a discussion on the role of social networking sites in organizing activism where writing is central, and with a set of sensitivities that can support designers and activists alike in designing socio-technical practices concerned with social change.

This paper discusses Digital Environmental Stewardship as an analytical framework that can help HCI scholarship to understand, design, and assess sociotechnical interventions concerned with sustainable waste management practices. Drawing on environmental studies, we outline key concepts of environmental stewardship – namely actors, capacity, and motivations – to unpack how different initiatives for handling waste are organised, both through grassroots and top-down interventions, and through varying sociotechnical configurations. We use these dimensions to analyse three different cases of waste management that illustrate how actions of care for the environment are ecologically organised, and what challenges might hinder them beyond –or besides– behavioural motivations. We conclude with a discussion on the orientation to action that the suggested framework provides, and its role in understanding, designing and assessing digital technologies in this domain. We argue that examining how stewardship actions fold into each other helps design sociotechnical interventions for managing waste from within a relational perspective.

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how - through the work of volunteers - surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community’s activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers’ concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events.

This paper illustrates design work carried out to develop an interactive theater performance. HCI has started to address the challenges of designing interactive performances, as both audience and performers’ experiences are considered and a variety of professional expertise involved. Nevertheless, research has overlooked how such design unfolds in practice, and what role artists play in exploring both the creative opportunities and the challenges associated with interweaving digital technologies. A two-day workshop was conducted to tailor the use of the ChameleonMask, a telepresence technology, within a performance. The analysis highlights the artists’ work to make the mask work while framing, exploring and conceptualizing its use. The discussion outlines the artists’ skills and design expertise, and how they redefine the role of HCI in performance-led research.

This paper presents an unexpected story about the outcomes of a civic project. CSCW and HCI scholarship has argued for a long-term perspective to assess civic projects and to understand how local communities appropriate - or maybe disregard - the material outcomes of these types of interventions. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to interpret the outcomes of such projects and how to make sense of their social impact on the wider contexts they are bound to. This article draws on the notion of "political ecologies of participation" to illustrate: i) how outcomes of socially engaged projects circulate through communities and can be appropriated independently of the research inquiries they stem from; and ii) how, through such processes, impact is reconfigured as issues are added to shared concerns. The paper sets out by analyzing the entanglement of actors, meanings (e.g., values, narratives, opinions) and forms of participation that were configured throughout the transformation observed. Attention is then drawn to their political qualities, including their inherent openness and their capacity to produce change locally. The paper introduces four analytical sensitivities illustrating how thinking with political ecologies of participation can help CSCW research focus on the longer processes whereby impact can be configured.

This paper illustrates the multifaceted aspects of caring practices, and the ways they are entangled with the organizing of community-driven initiatives. Highlighting the situated inter-dependencies between concerns for care and efficiency, and considering caring practices as essential to the practical work that makes communities work, we reflect on how caring and efficiency rationalities frame the use, and scope the design of digital technologies. Drawing on two cases, the analysis shows the ways in which digital technologies oftentimes overshadow communities' key concerns for care, and how attempts to design for community settings can result in anti-designs, that is sociotechnical configurations that can disrupt caring practices. The contribution of the paper is twofold: first, an analysis of the different configurations of caring and efficiency and, second, a focus on care in the design and appropriation of technologies into this space.

This paper analyzes the self-organizing network Hoffice – a merger between the words home and office – that brings together people who wish to co-create temporary workplaces. The Hoffice concept entails a co-working methodology, and a set of practices inherent in opening up one’s home as a temporary, shared workplace, with the help of existing social media platforms, particularly Facebook. We discuss both the practices of co-creating temporary workplaces, particularly for workers who lack a stable office and orchestrate flexible work arrangements, and the values and rhetoric enshrined in Hoffice. We collected our research materials through interviews, participant observation, and workshops. Our findings draw attention to i) the practical arrangement of Hoffice events, ii) the participatory efforts to get individual work done, and 3) the co-creation of an alternative social model that encourages trust, self-actualization, and openness. To conclude, we discuss how Hoffice is already making change for its members, and how this is indicative of a politics of care. We contribute to research on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) by highlighting grassroots efforts to create alternative ways of organizing nomadic work and navigating non-traditional employment arrangements.

This paper presents a case study of an interactive performance that was produced and designed to encourage civic engagement and reflection in relation to the social tensions in a low-income suburb, mostly inhabited by people with immigrant backgrounds. The design of the technological setup in the performance encouraged participation by means of text entries that audience members could share with others. The analysis draws on the corpus of interview and observational data collected, as well as the related text messages that were shared during the performance. We illustrate the different levels at which citizens make sense of societal issues they are concerned about, as well as the audience-citizens' perception of participating in such an artistic experience.

Designing for interactive performances is challenging both in terms of technology design, and of understanding the interplay between technology, narration, and audience interactions. Bio-sensors and bodily tracking technologies afford new ways for artists to engage with audiences, and for audiences to become part of the artwork. Their deployment raises a number of issues for designers of interactive performances. This paper explores such issues by presenting five design ideas for interactive performance afforded by bio-sensing and bodily tracking (i.e. Microsoft Kinect) developed during two design workshops. We use these ideas, and the related scenarios to discuss three emerging issues namely: temporality of input, autonomy and control, and visibility of input in relation to the deployment of bio-sensors and bodily tracking technologies in the context of interactive performances.

Digital technologies provide theater with new possibilities for combining traditional stage-based performances with interactive artifacts, for streaming remote parallel performances and for other device facilitated audience interaction. Compared to traditional theater, mixed-media performances require a different type of engagement from the actors and rehearsing is challenging, as it can be impossible to rehearse with all the functional technology and interaction. Here, we report experiences from a case study of two mixed-media performances; we studied the rehearsal practices of two actors who were performing in two different plays. We describe how the actors practiced presence during rehearsal in a play where they would be geographically remote, and we describe the challenges of rehearsing with several remote and interactive elements. Our study informs the broader aims of interactive and mixed media performances through addressing critical factors of implementing technology into rehearsal practices.

We draw on the concept of agency in order to understand the process of how design materials 'talk back' to designers. In so doing, we illustrate the various levels at which agency can emerge in the context of intensive short-time prototyping sessions. In HCI, it is often assumed that the designer is the agent that acts intentionally in the design process. Contrary to this, recent notions of agency provide a way of analysing the performative role of design materials as intra-actions between components within a given phenomenon, rather than as meanings merely ascribed by actions of designers. The notion of agency puts focus on the emerging properties of materials and how they actively contribute to the way that design activity unfolds. The analyses showed how interaction design is to a large extent driven by emergent characteristics of available materials. The results have implications for understanding material interactions and materiality in interaction design.

This paper introduces the workshop "Exploring Design Methods for Mobile Learning" to be held at MobileHCI 2011, in Stockholm, Sweden.