In this pictorial, we discuss the design of Exchangeopoly, a boardgame developed to investigate exchanges between people in communities when they help each other out. Such exchanges are often acts of kindness for forms of volunteering that are not remunerated financially and are built on social capital. The boardgame scaffolded explorations of scenarios with participants where informal altruistic interactions in their communities are tokenised, rewarded and incentivised. We focus on the designed-in features and considerations that went into the visual and material production of the game and its gameplay mechanics. We discuss how Exchangeopoly was a valuable method that surfaced existing and speculated practices of exchange, and supported participants to explore the opportunities and problems of representing and rewarding such interactions. We contribute insights about the usefulness of exchangeopoly as a tool to explore scenarios and surface tensions about tokenisation in community value exchange.

This paper responds to sustainable HCI’s call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

Intelligent assistants are an emerging form of interface in digital devices. They are disrupting this space through conversations which have socio-cultural dimensions. However, what is not known are people's perceptions and expectations from these assistants. In this paper, we studied the Indian context through guided interviews and situational observations. The user-agent interaction begins with communication of intent. We found that Indians take a lot of time to articulate intent and also prefer conversing through type. Personalization and context are other two critical components, where latter gives deeper meaning to user intent and is culture specific. E.g. in India; security, shared public spaces and infrastructure availability are of higher importance as compared to the west. The need for user-profile building is identified as a key factor in adoption of assistive agents in India. We discuss influencing factors that will help build these user-profiles for Indian scenarios.