Smart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialled it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.

This paper reports on a co-speculative interview study with charitable donors to explore the future of programmable, conditional and data-driven donations. Responding to the rapid emergence of blockchain-based and AI-supported financial technologies, we specifically examine the potential of automated, third-party 'escrows', where donations are held before they are released or returned based on specified rules and conditions. To explore this we conducted pilot workshops with 9 participants and an interview study in which 14 further participants were asked about their experiences of donating money, and invited to co-speculate on a service for programmable giving. The study elicited how data-driven conditionality and automation could be leveraged to create novel donor experiences, however also illustrated the inherent tensions and challenges involved in giving programmatically. Reflecting on these findings, our paper contributes implications both for the design of programmable aid platforms, and the design of escrow-based financial services in general.

In this paper we present fieldwork findings from engagements with a cooperative group of strategic and operations transport maintainers, responsible for the maintenance of drainage infrastructure to mitigate the risk and impact of flooding on the network. Through transport maintainer perspectives from rail and highways sectors, we focus on developing an understanding of work-practices in the context of transport surface-water management, and how the recent acceleration towards 'data-driven' technologies in support of maintenance intervention decision-making (i.e. the work of coordinating the cleaning of drainage) is integrated and impacting on current work-practice. Furthermore, we document and consider how maintainers perceive the potential role of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and highlight emerging opportunities and tensions that may arise ahead of its future design and implementation.

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.

As in all collaborative work, trust is a vital ingredient of successful computer supported cooperative work, yet there is little in the way of design principles to help practitioners develop systems that foster trust. To address this gap, we present a set of design patterns, based on our experience designing systems with the explicit intention of increasing trust between stakeholders. We contextualize these patterns by describing our own learning process, from the development, testing and refinement of a trust model, to our realization that the insights we gained along the way were most usefully expressed through design patterns. In addition to a set of patterns for trust, this paper seeks to demonstrate of the value of patterns as a means of communicating the nuances revealed through ethnographic investigation.

Driven by changes in working practices and technology trends, organizations are increasingly reliant on mobile workers and the data they capture. However, while significant work has been carried out on increasing the usability of mobile devices and applications, little attention has been paid to the quality of data captured by mobile workers. If this data is inaccurate or untrustworthy, serious consequences can ensue. In this paper we study a system targeted at mobile workers in the highways sector that is deliberately designed to increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data collected. The resulting Inspections application has been very positively received by workers and we present lessons that we believe can be applied to other applications of this type.

This paper documents a programme of research to explore the development of mobile social travel information systems, where dynamic travel information is produced by travellers themselves and distributed within communities united by similar travel patterns and everyday activities. The resulting system, called OurTravel, was the subject of a series of real-world trials involving three diverse physical communities: a rural village, a group of urban office workers and the attendees of a contemporary arts festival. We describe the design and implementation of the OurTravel system, our experiences of running these trials and the insights gained.

There is a significant disparity between wayfinding support services available in outdoor and in-building locations. Services such as Google Maps and in-car GPS allow users to examine unknown outdoor locations in advance as well as receive guidance en-route. In contrast, there is relatively little digital technology to support users in complex building architectures, e.g. institution buildings where users are generally limited to using traditional signage or asking for directions at the reception. However, recent advances in pervasive digital display technology are enabling a new range of possibilities and are making this topic increasingly subject to study. In this paper, we describe five formative studies involving 39 participants using situated digital displays, a Person Locator Kiosk, and personal mobile devices. We report our findings by gaining insights and feedback from users in order to develop wayfinding assistance for visitors in an in-building environment.