This one-day workshop invites discussions on the role of data and data-enabled practices in addressing challenges of environmental sustainability. Fostering acts of care for the environment is a complex endeavor entailing multi-lifespan relations to people and institutions, to the environment and other non-human actors, and to existing infrastructures and processes. The workshop addresses such challenges by exploring the role of data, and the work of making them actionable for the many actors involved in protecting the environment. It will bring together interdisciplinary scholars, representatives of public institutions, activists, environmental collectives, and IT practitioners interested in the design of more sustainable futures. The workshop will discuss analytical and design issues of data-enabled sustainability, along with the practical opportunities of using data to infrastructure acts of care for the environment. The workshop will accommodate up to twenty participants and will be mainly run on-site.

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.

This paper extends the literature on social media activism by foregrounding the invisible work of orchestrating online activism. 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 happens 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.