The Collaborative Work of Stewardship in Waste Management in Multi-tenant Apartment BuildingsThis paper examines the collaborative work of residents, housing associations, and property owners, in a multi-apartment housing complex, to manage household waste. 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 actors involved 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 sustainability research of CSCW approaches grounded in the everyday contingent emergencies of environmental care. We argue for approaches to sustainability that reflect the work to maintain sustainability ––not just produce it-- and the `good enough', a locally and reflexively produced equilibrium between maintenance and repair, which can frame the design of sociotechnical interventions mediating practices of waste management.2025CRChiara Rossitto et al.Infrastructure StudiesCSCW
Designing with decolonial intent: Towards a decolonial archive in resistance to epistemicideThis paper follows a trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural arts research endeavour which seeks to utilise the restitution of neglected archival materials to engage the social and cultural trajectory of the villages and nation from which that material and intangible heritage was taken, stolen, destroyed, lost, or diminished. The paper engages with tensions in colonial and decolonial design of digital heritage between the potential for counter-histories and imaginaries on the one-hand and the colonial impulse of computing and its logics on the other. Through the research through design activities formed with a decolonial praxiology, we explore how the systems, practices and technologies of archival practices in this project develop an ethics of knowledge-making that neither satisfies or diminishes decolonial intent. We tentatively argue for approaches to decolonial design that are accounted for in local and pragmatic modes of knowledge making that are delinked from globalised and abstracted systems that otherwise repress them.2025RCRob Comber et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
Yarn as a Means to Give Form to Entanglements of Regulation, Design and Sustainability PracticesWhen 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 specific 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.2025ARAnton Poikolainen Rosén et al.Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Designing with the Solar Internet: Towards Constraint-Based Design for Sustainable ConsumptionIn response to the escalating impact of mindless consumption in the fashion and IT industry, we began to think of and with a constraint-based approach to interaction design. This paper describes a research through design investigation into a paradigm of constraint-based design, founded on the practical and perceived constraints of solar-powered internet. Our intention is not to examine individual consumer as a site for sustainable transition, but the industries and industry practitioners at the interface with consumers. We employed strategies that included optimisation as a form of minimisation, visibility as a means to mark existing absence, offloading from automation, and the design of dead-ends. We discuss the challenges in learning to design against the cornucopian paradigm. While the overall vision of an internet powered by the sun seems at once desirable and achievable, the pursuit of a constraints-based interaction design highlights the desire to confirm the dominant paradigm of abundance.2025FBFatemeh Bakhshoudeh et al.KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Media Technology and Interaction DesignSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingClimate Change Communication ToolsCHI
Designing for Digital Environmental Stewardship in Waste ManagementWaste 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.2023MLMartin Valdemar Anker Lindrup et al.Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Different Together: Design for Radical PlacemakingThis work responds to isolating urban places, and contributes new ways for thinking about placemaking. Progressing through autoethnography and prototyping, we critique design proposals with Lefebvre’s theory of utopia. There inhabitants can enjoy and shape their place together without risking depletion of their abilities and motivations to do so. The critique produces political sensibilities that help us make sense of common tensions among inhabitants, landowners, and visitors, and generate possible responses. The critique process itself illustrates how designing through critique with theory can help us think in new ways. This paper contributes a display of how design with critical theory can happen, ultimately to support our abilities and motivations to envision and make places of social flourishing that can respond to our socio-environmental crises.2023AAAndreas Almqvist et al.University of GalwayCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyInclusive DesignCHI
Making Energy Matter: Soma Design for Ethical Relations in Energy SystemsThere is a need to reframe our relationship to energy, particularly in Western energy contexts, where we have plentiful access and no meaningful barriers to use. This paper outlines a first-person engagement with energy systems and shows how somaesthetic design is one possible means to cultivate and design for new ways of ethical being with energy systems. Early autobiographical design work focused on designing for 'sustainability' revealed a trajectory of fatalism and restriction. A turn towards enacting material relations, co-performed with others, opened into a more holistic relationship with energy. Reflecting on how this process unfolded, we argue that sustainability is not, in itself, a somaesthetic sensibility, and remains constrained within rational framings. We develop this argument to contribute to a new understanding of how we somatically relate to energy and how relational ethics in interaction design research and practice can encourage a felt sense for the materiality of energy.2023TAThorhildur Asgeirsdottir et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologySustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Regulating Responsibility: Environmental Sustainability, Law, and the Platformisation of Waste ManagementThe 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.2023RCRob Comber et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologySustainable HCIEnergy Conservation Behavior & InterfacesCHI
Towards Digital Environmental Stewardship: the Work of Caring for the Environment in Waste ManagementThis 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 th at 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.2022CRChiara Rossitto et al.Stockholm UniversityDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)Sustainable HCIEnergy Conservation Behavior & InterfacesCHI
Making New Worlds - Transformative Becomings with Soma DesignSoma design is intended to increase our ability to appreciate through all our senses and lead to more meaningful interactions with the world. We contribute a longer-term study of soma design that shows evidence of this promise. Using storytelling approaches we draw on qualitative data from a three-month study of the soma mat and breathing light in four households. We tell stories of people's becomings in the world as they learn of new possibilities for their somas; and as their somas transform. We show how people drew on their somaesthetic experiences with the prototypes to find their way through troubled times; and how through continued engagement some felt compelled to make transformations in how they live their lives. We discuss the implications for the overarching soma design program, focusing on what is required to design for ways of leading a better life.2022ASAnna Ståhl et al.RISE, Research Institutes of SwedenShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Sustaining a Networked Community Resource: Findings from a Longitudinal Situated Display DeploymentConfiguring 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.2021SNStuart Alan Nicholson et al.Swansea UniversityCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologySustainable HCICHI
Emotion Work in Experience-Centered DesignExperience Centered Design (ECD) implores us to develop empathic relationships and understanding of participants, to actively work with our senses and emotions within the design process. However, theories of experience-centered design do little to account for emotion work undertaken by design researchers when doing this. As a consequence, how a design researcher's emotions are experienced, navigated and used as part of an ECD process are rarely published. So, while emotion is clearly a tool that we use, we don't share with one another how, why and when it gets used. This has a limiting effect on how we understand design processes, and opportunities for training. Here, we share some of our experiences of working with ECD. We analyse these using Hochschild's framework of emotion work to show how and where this work occurs. We use our analysis to question current ECD practices and provoke debate.2019MBMadeline Balaam et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyParticipatory DesignUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
The Right to the Sustainable Smart CityEnvironmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co-designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity.2019SHSara Heitlinger et al.City, University of LondonSmart Cities & Urban SensingSustainable HCICHI
Member-Owned Alternatives: Exploring Participatory Forms of Organising with CooperativesCooperatives are member-owned organisations, run for the common benefit of their members. While cooperatives are a longstanding way of organising, they have received little attention in CSCW. In this paper, through interviews with 26 individuals from 24 different cooperatives, our focus is an exploratory inquiry on how cooperatives could expand thinking into what future economies can look like and the part technologies may play in them. We discuss (1) the work to make the co-op work, that is, the special effort involved in managing an enterprise in a democratic and inclusive way, (2) the multiple purposes that cooperatives can serve for their members, well beyond financial benefit, and (3) ICT usage within cooperatives as a site of tension and dialogue. We conclude by discussing the meaning and measures of success in alternative economies, and lessons learned for CSCW scholarship on civic and societal organisations.2018ALAiri Lampinen et al.Sustainability and Local ActionCSCW