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.

In this position paper we present our ongoing research in relation to cultivating democracy and civic participation through the writing and performance of interactive theater experiences1. We provide an example of a performance that facilitates audience participation through expression and sharing of opinions and emotions, by means of digital technologies. The performance leads to further discussion within the community and inspires more artistic and theatrical experiences in this context.

This paper investigates the practices and dynamics of a grassroots initiative that takes a non-monetary sharing approach to the issue of food surplus. Food sharing Copenhagen (FS-CPH) is a community-led, volunteer-run organisation working towards reducing food waste by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, bakeries, and private individuals and redistributing it locally, for free. The analysis illustrates the practices of the three main working groups within the organisation, the role of technology within the organization, and how food is framed through a community economies approach.

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 addresses the sociotechnical challenges of organising queuing at large scale, face-to-face, food-sharing events. The authors have partnered with a grassroots food-sharing community, FoodSharing Copenhagen (FS-CPH), to reconsider queuing practices at food-sharing events. The results present three “queuing canvases” that illustrate how FS-CPH members envision digitally mediated queuing at food-sharing events. The paper outlines three themes that emerge from this design work: communicating activism through queuing, encountering others through queuing, and transparency in queuing mechanisms. We discuss how the envisioned ideas illustrate novel perspectives on queuing in volunteer-driven settings, while sometimes falling back on accepted norms and common expectations of how queuing should work. To address this, we present a set of sensitivities, for designers and activists alike, to design for queuing in settings where non-monetary sharing is central.

This paper discusses the role context plays in promoting engagement and exploration in situated learning experiences during field trips. We look at field trips where children engage with the physical and social environment in order to learn about cultural and social aspects of the city they live in. By drawing on empirical data collected by means of qualitative methods, we discuss how learning unfolds along trajectories of experience towards pre-defined and emerging learning objectives. We reflect of the role technology can play in sup-porting learning experiences outside the classroom.

This paper discusses the role context plays in promoting engagement and exploration in situated learning experiences during field trips. We look at field trips where children engage with the physical and social environment in order to learn about cultural and social aspects of the city they live in. By drawing on empirical data collected by means of qualitative methods, we discuss how learning unfolds along trajectories of experience towards pre-defined and emerging learning objectives. We reflect of the role technology can play in supporting learning experiences outside the classroom.

This article presents an empirical study investigating audience participation in an interactive theater performance. During the performance, audience members were enticed to act upon and contribute to the performance by sharing their opinions, emotions, values and other thoughts, by means of text messages that were integrated into the performance itself. The study aimed at understanding the main characteristics of audience participation in the interactive performance, as well as the role of communication technology as a medium enabling social participation. The results draw attention to the immediate and reflective facets of audience participation, both unfolding at two different but interrelated levels of interactions: an individual and collective one.

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.

In this issue we explore the conceptual, analytical and design challenges inherent in the notion of “Nomadic Culture”. The papers included highlight how research on mobility has contributed to the CSCW community, while pointing to unsolved problems, future challenges and research agendas. We see this collection of papers as developing a more holistic perspective on nomadic culture, and connecting this scholarship with recent research on sharing and exchange platforms as sites of work. This intervention contributes to an understanding of nomadic culture by providing a more contemporary perspective on the social and cultural aspects of workplace sites and co-working practices.

The idea behind this Special Issue originates in a workshop on HCI and CSCW research related to work and non-work-life balance organized in conjunction with the ECSCW 2013 conference by the issue co-editors. Fifteen papers were originally submitted for possible inclusion in this Special Issue, and four papers were finally accepted for publication after two rounds of rigorous peer review. The four accepted papers explore, in different ways, HCI at the boundary of work and life. In this editorial, we offer a description of the overall theme and rationale for the Special Issue, including an introduction on the topic relevance and background, and a reflection on how the four accepted papers further current research and debate on the topic.

The overall theme of this presentation is how especially highly motivated upper secondary students perceive and understand universities in general and university studies in particular. The presentation will contribute to the an understanding of university studies as part of a global change of education from the perspective of upper secondary students; moreover, it will address how such a change intertwines with the transformation of the elementary and upper secondary educational systems, and the evermore present and used ICTs in contemporary education. These changes in the formal educational system in general, and the challenges that imply for higher education in particular, will serve as a backdrop for the analysis of the interviews. IT will also be used in the concluding reflections on how higher education is perceived by a group of upper secondary students. The empirical material was collected by means of semi-structured interviews with six upper secondary students attending an international program in a school located in the southern part of the greater Stockholm area. Two main themes emerge from the analysis. The first concerns the reasons and motivations for enrolling in a university program. The second one relates to the expectations connected to studying at the university, a theme that to a large extent revolves around expectations on the teacher-student relationships; a relationship the participants regarded as paramount of the new educational context they were about to enter.

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.

In this paper, we reflect on how scaling out – recreating and reconfiguring horizontally the most promising practices across contexts (Manzini, 2015) – can help local, grassroots initiatives to grow in a socially sustainable fashion and to sustain their action over time. We ground our discussion on the case of Hoffice, a self-organizing network that is experimenting with an alternative social model for collectively organizing and supporting flexible forms of work. In a prior ethnographic study of the Hoffice network (Rossitto & Lampinen, 2018), we outlined the socio-technical practices and values that characterise this community. We complement this previous piece by zooming in on the community’s struggles in the face of rapid growth. We conclude by proposing a way to rethink the challenges that growth can pose.

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.

This ECSCW 2013 workshop discusses the topic of extending and applying CSCW themes, concepts and sensibilities to practices at the boundary between work and life. We provide a rationale for the workshop, grounded on the need to extend current work examining the blurring between work and non-work activities, and also to look at design approaches to address this through collaborative technology. The paper also includes information on the program for this event and biographical details of the proposers.

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 presents a qualitative study of an interactive audio drama facilitated by a location-based application. The investigation focuses on an accessible experience, a play in which the audience members simply trigger new scenes of the audio drama as they walk to predefined city areas. The findings draw attention to the role of the mobile technology in facilitating this particular artistic experience. Furthermore, they illustrate the various levels at which creative imagination and open interpretation emerge as audience members seek to make sense of the interrelations between the locative media experienced and elements of the places inhabited during the audio narrative. In concluding the article, designing for loose coupling between mobile media and physical places is suggested as a strategy to enable people's engagement in meaningful experience through the use of various location-based services.

This paper describes how people make sense of and use constellations of technologies in a nomadic setting. Particular attention is drawn to how the situated orchestration of devices and applications within a constellation reflects university students’ concern to manage their projects at a number of locations, and to create places amenable to their activities. By drawing on data collected by means of qualitative methods, we address collaborative issues inherent in the negotiated use of a particular technology, as well as aspects related to individuals’ experience of place in relation to the specific activities they engage with, and the other people involved. The analysis also brings into focus how constellations of technologies emerge and dissolve within collaborative ensembles that only exist within the short timeframe of a project, and how this can cause appropriation problems within a group. In concluding this article, we reflect on how taking into account the problems observed calls for a need to designing for constellations of technologies and, thus, rethinking interaction models with and between technologies.

Despite the extensive body of publications exploring the potential of mobile devices in learning settings, little research is today concerned with how issues of mobility and place shape high-demanding cognitive activities such as writing. This paper investigates mobile learning practices while university students write technical reports collaboratively. The paper draws on a body of HCI research that seeks to elucidate how the growing use of ubiquitous and mobile technologies redefines our relationtionship and experience of place and time. While such technologies and applications allow people to be mobile and engage with activities at a variety of physical locations, understanding their use raises analytical issues concerning the situated nature of the very practices mobile technologies facilitate. According to Dourish (2006), for instance, when the technologies of interest are portable, distributed and embedded in our physical and social environment (i.e. wireless services), it becomes central to understand how such technologies transform people’s interactions with a specific location (i.e. how they navigate or represent it), or how they can enable a meaningful engagement with a given physical environment. This, in turn, draws attention to the social, emotional and corporeal aspects concerned with people’s experience of being in place, rather than merely investigating the physical affordance determined by its structural dimension (McCarthy et al., 2005). This paper investigates the role of physical place in the context of mobile learning activities. More specifically, it focuses on reciprocal transactions between places occupied, technologies used and the specific activities undertaken. Our interest in place is, therefore, tightly interwoven with the use of technologies, how they are appropriated in the context of the group activities to distribute the various writing tasks to a number of different locations, and to practically turn locations into appropriate places for writing. In terms of analysis, this entails to draw attention to writers’ psychological, social and practical orientation to the places they occupy, and not merely to their writing tools and resource, tasks and objective. Our interest in understanding the materiality of place, and the different ways in which it can practically shape the mobile collaborative writing activities, draws therefore on the idea that place does not merely entail geometrical and physical properties, but it also encompasses facets of human experience and activities within it. The empirical material examined comes from two investigations of university students engaged in collaborative writing activities within two different courses. The theoretical approach chosen for the examination of the materiality of place, and how issues of mobility reflect on writing, is grounded in Casey’s phenomenological theorization of “place”. The analysis of the data shows the role of physical environments and contexts on mobile collaborative writing activities. These results contribute to a move away from the conception of mobile learning occurring anytime and anywhere. Instead it call for an understanding of the material “here” and “now” of a particular “mobile” collaborative writing activities.

Our contribution to this workshop consists of a number of ideas we believe are worth investigating within the ongoing discourse on Smart Cities. In so doing, we seek to address issues of informal, lifelong learning within cities, and to draw attention to the role technology could play in encouraging inter-cultural communication and a common sense of belonging.

This paper introduces a project proposal that contextualizes sustainability in educational settings, particularly intergenerational learning of sustainable environmental practices. It raises questions concerned with the role that groups and institutions, learning, and a care for place can play in developing awareness about sustainability.

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 article presents the results of a qualitative study in which the challenges of adopting and adapting digital media to the context of higher education were investigated. A workshop attended by university teachers and professional producers of educational video material was organized. The analysis draws attention to issues concerning the quality of digital media, the development of the professional skills required to produce and use them, and the orchestration of learning activities centered on such learning resources. The paper argues that understanding the challenges around the appropriation of digital media in educational settings encompasses the social and contextual aspects of the settings in which technology is to be used, and not merely the pedagogical concerns underlying its usage.

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 one-day workshop invites discussion on the various socio-technical processes and dynamics that characterize scale and scaling in local, community-sited initiatives. Seeking to move beyond a view of scale as mere growth in numbers and a matter of technology-mediated replication, the workshop aims at developing a nuanced vocabulary to talk about various forms of scale and practices of scaling in CSCW research. It will bring together interdisciplinary scholars, activists, practitioners and representatives of the public sector who wish to question and further develop the notion of scale generally associated with processes of upscaling. The workshop provides a forum to discuss:i) concepts, theories and empirical cases that broaden our view of what constitutes scale; andii) the implications for CSCW research in assessing the long-term impact and sustenance of socio-technical innovations. The workshop will accommodate up to twenty participants and will be run virtually.

This paper presents an ongoing ethnographic study of the Hoffice Network in Stockholm, Sweden. The concept Hoffice (Home + Office) relates to the emerging phenomenon of people opening up their homes as shared workplaces, and to the related organizational framework enabling the creation of co-working spaces. We focus on sharing and caring as two overarching values emerging from our preliminary data analysis. In doing so, we discuss three main themes characterizing the socio-cultural practices around the Hoffice, namely: a concern for other people, a concern for implicit norms and cultural aspects inherent in the Hoffice structure, and the role of the facilitators and organizers in making Hoffice a sustainable, self-organizing practice. These themes allow us to develop an initial understanding of the notion of nomadic culture and to connect it to a view of the collaborative economy that values sense of community, mutual trust, support and continuity over time.

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.

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.

This paper presents a case study of a fully working prototype of the Sensus smart guitar. Eleven professional guitar players were interviewed after a prototype test session. The smartness of the guitar was perceived as enabling the integration of a range of equipment into a single device, and the proactive exploration of novel expressions. The results draw attention to the musicians' sense-making of the smart qualities, and to the perceived impact on their artistic practices. The themes highlight how smartness was experienced in relation to the guitar's agency and the skills it requires, the tension between explicit (e.g. playing a string) and implicit (e.g. keeping rhythm) body movements, and to performing and producing music. Understanding this felt sense of smartness is relevant to how contemporary HCI research conceptualizes mundane artefacts enhanced with smart technologies, and to how such discourse can inform related design issues.

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.

Designing for mixed-reality performances is challenging both in terms of technology design, and in terms of understanding the interplay between technology, narration, and (the outcomes of) audience interactions. This complexity also stems from the variety of roles in the creative team often entailing technology designers, artists, directors, producers, set-designers and performers. In this multidisciplinary, one-day workshop, we seek to bring together HCI scholars, designers, artists, and curators to explore the potential provided by Design Fiction as a method to generate ideas for Mixed-Reality Performance (MRP) through various archetypes including scripts, programs, and posters. By drawing attention to novel interactive technologies, such as bio-sensors and environmental IoT, we seek to generate design fiction scenarios capturing the aesthetic and interactive potential for mixed-reality performances, as well as the challenges to gain access to audience members' data -- i.e. physiological states, daily routines, conversations, etc.

This paper presents a case study of a Mixed-Reality Performance employing 360-degree video for a virtual reality experience. We repurpose the notions of friction to illustrate the different threads at which priming is enacted during the performance to create an immersive audience experience. We look at aspects of friction between the different layers of the Mixed-Reality Performance, namely: temporal friction, friction between the physical and virtual presence of the audience, and friction between realities. We argue that Mixed-Reality Performances that employ immersive technology, do not need to rely on its presumed immersive nature to make the performance an engaging or coherent experience. Immersion, in such performances, emerges from the audience' transition towards a more active role, and the creation of various fictional realities through frictions.

Mixed-Reality Performances that employ immersive technology, do not need to rely on its presumed immersive nature to make the performance an engaging or coherent experience. Immersion in such performances emerges from the audience’ transition towards a more active role in the performance and by creating different realities through frictions.

Technological development and adoption are characterized by historical waves, reflecting both technical advancements and social transformations in mutually constitutive relation. Today, we are in the middle of another of these waves characterized, for instance, by the widespread focus on AI and other emerging technologies. In this context, activists and designers are constructively appropriating these emerging technologies, thus showing how socio-technical aspects of technological design, development, and implementation, contribute to ongoing transformations of power relations, life conditions, and our collective future. This workshop aims at bringing together C&T researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, promoting, and designing forms of sustainable appropriation of contemporary technologies by grassroots communities. With sustainable appropriation, we refer to a wider concept of sustainability including ecological and social aspects, as presented for example in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

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.

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.