In this special interest group (SIG) we invite researchers, practitioners, and educators to share their perspectives and experiences on the expansion of human-centred perspective to more-than-human design orientation in human-computer interaction (HCI). This design for and with more-than-human perspectives and values cover a range of fields and topics, and comes with unique design opportunities and challenges. In this SIG, we propose a forum for exchange of concrete experiences and a range of perspectives, and to facilitate reflective discussions and the identification of possible future paths.

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversa- tion asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical transformation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was or- ganized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon.

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.  

Rising societal polarisations around health and climate crises have brought more attention to the close relations between social and environmental challenges. These polarisations triggered an interest in the participatory design (PD) field in developing approaches that enhance connections between diverse actors operating across societal and environmental sectors. However, the capabilities needed for these approaches have not been sufficiently articulated in PD research and education. To fill in this gap, we define ‘reworlding’ as an operation of self-critique within PD that engages with capabilities needed to reveal and articulate radical interdependencies between humans and more-than-humans, across social and environmental worlds, and within situated contexts. We propose both the redefinition of the design capabilities needed for (re)connecting these worlds (retracing, reconnecting, reimagining and reinstitutioning), as well as a reconsideration of learning environments where these capabilities can be tested and enhanced.  

This article explores how co-design workshops might engage with the conditions that constrain our anticipation of more just futures. We discuss how practitioner commitments to feminisms might contribute to more critical exploration. Rather than exploring what practitioners should be doing in feminist futures-focused co-design, we seek a better understanding of how this practice unfolds and evolves. Therefore, the article discusses feminist anticipation from the perspective of three, first-person narratives. These accounts explore how practitioner ‘feminist tendencies’ become manifested in co-design materials. We also explore how the multi-directional ‘back-talk’ of workshop materials mediates how stakeholders, participants and the designers themselves co-anticipate contested, deviant, and plural futures. Borrowing the words from feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, these stories from practice seek to both answer and provoke the question: how are we unmaking how hard it is to deviate from what is expected?

This chapter will outline what we label ‘collaborative future-making’ (CFM), which can be understood as an interplay between critical imagination and collaborative engagements in future-making processes. Using critical imagination to break out of (imagined) political and scholarly deadlocks is an important theme within collaborative future-making. Imagining should not be confused, however, with an abstract practice. Instead, critical imagination links directly to forms of participation and engagement. Collaborative engagement concerns how we can work together. At the centre is an ethos of democratizing processes of change, that is, to acknowledge people’s skills and rights to influence their everyday environments. This approach should be understood as a shift from engaging with the future through forecasting to a concern with how critical imagination can challenge basic assumptions, norms and structures to widen the perspectives on what constitutes socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable futures, engaging not only professionals and policymakers, but also citizens and civil society. This chapter presents opportunities in what we call ‘collaborative future-making’, as well as highlighting the potential problems and challenges in collaborating. This critical perspective is illustrated through a series of empirical examples that combines critical perspectives with constructive and collaborative aspects.

How do people become conversant with futures-in-the-making? This paper explores speculative design from the position that futures have agency in the present and therefore forms of speculation - as well as futures - need to be inclusive. Regarding this as a democratic right throws attention on engagement processes, noting that speculation is often centred on the designer's interests rather than seeding appropriation by publics. I argue that situating speculation in a way that is accessible for negotiation requires careful attention to the hybrid process + objectartifacts that result from designing both a provocation and a process for encountering it. My central case study describes one such hybrid artifact, a counterfactual workshop for considering futures by exploring different imagined pasts and making a journey towards alternative presents. This play of temporalities - and the accompanying methods for opening and narrowing the creative work of taking these journeys - suggest a means that speculative design might be situated with participants, thereby simultaneously reflecting on and mitigating the anticipatory nature of the materials. I deconstruct this instance of curating speculative artifacts to reveal not only its mechanisms, but the many points where engagement processes reflect political choices.

Design research has recently turned to theoretical perspectives, including care ethics and posthumanism, to counter the industrial processes that have led to climate crisis. As design theorists and ethnographers of interaction, we researched experimental eco-farming in a community that shared many of these theoretical and ideological commitments. Our goal was not to offer an account of use and provide design implications in support of it. Instead, we chose to identify concrete practices and artifacts that embody the sorts of industrial transformations that we are seeking-even if they are manifest in an imperfect or partial form. We encountered practices focused on community building, local resilience to climate disruptions, experiments in eco-farming, economic survival, and attracting the next generation. One interlocutor translated these concerns into a simple binary, asking, "do we want to live here?" This paper contributes to a design research agenda that might (eventually) provide an afirmative answer.

Participatory Design's focus on people comes from a social democratic vision. However, as climate and existential crises press us to consider wellbeing beyond humans alone, we ask what a pluriversal design agenda might include and what could be articulated as ‘participatory’? Necessarily, this inquiry has limits, as participation usually implies human voice, rights, representation and structures of decision-making. This paper commits to these concerns while asking ethical, political and onto-epistemological questions regarding how worlds and futures are shaped when more-than-human entities – plants, animals, rocks, rivers and spirits – participate in our becoming? We offer a meeting of feminist techno-science with practices and philosophies from Japan and beyond to offer thought experiments in engaging with difference and plurality. And we give several examples of practice situated at ontological boundaries to offer some novel thoughts on ‘participation otherwise’, always-participating-with-many and the futures this could usher in.  

Research in diverse areas such as climate change, happiness and wellbeing emphasizes the need for transformative change, stressing the importance of rethinking established values, goals and paradigms prevailing among civil servants, policy- and decision makers. In this paper, we discuss a role that design can play in this, especially how processes of counterfactual world-making can help facilitate reflection on worldviews and the shape of future forms of governance. By exploring different presents, rather than conditions in the future, this approach allows civil servants to consider, create and resist playful alternatives to business-as-usual. In this way, we demonstrate how design can stimulate imagination both as to futures and people’s role in shaping these futures.

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research.

The research centers around two major themes:

• Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures.
• Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society.

During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines.

The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but gain a specific meaning in relation to the research area. Others are more preliminary attempts to advance our understanding or probe into new potential practices within collaborative future-making. In that sense the concepts in the glossary are well situated and grounded in past and ongoing research within this research group, at the same time as they are meant to suggest, propose and point towards practices and approaches yet to come.

The concepts in this glossary are not only meant to be descriptive but also performative. In that sense, assembling and circulating this glossary is part of collaborative future-making. As pointed out by Michelle Westerlaken in her articulation of “Doing Concepts” (see page 15), “...without proposing, critiquing, or working towards a common or uncommon understanding of certain concepts, it becomes impossible to ‘make futures’ in any deliberate fashion.”

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 article is polyvocal and tentative. We, Jaz and Ann, are exploring the beliefs that motivate our work, in this first of Jaz’s columns. For both of us, collaborative working is a method but also an end point—a goal that recognizes the interdependent nature of all life and looks to support it. Here we discuss the “co-” in co-design through a dialogical reflection on feminism and process.

Crowdfunding offers a different approach to social innovation undertakings at a time of rapidly shrinking state support. Social innovation involves new social practices that aim to better meet the social needs and shape collective futures. The innovation here hinges on the way in which crowdfunding platforms can change the way that society works as well as the financial details of individual campaigns. Working alongside the design features of the platform are the social, economic, and legal aspects of financial systems that evolve over time and shape what platforms can enable. In this chapter, we discuss how publics form around platforms with an interest in what is being supported. We use the term “paying publics” to refer to the way in which the four UK-based platforms we feature are using this relationship with their funders and supporters to change how funding affects communities and environmental behaviour. We can be quite precise about who the individual members of a crowd contributing through a particular platform to a specific campaign might be, whether friends and family or international networks of backers. So, we suggest that we are not served well by the term “crowd.” In talking about publics, we refer to the way that particular groups may be brought into being by the actions of the platform. No single platform is redesigning economic life. However, each offers possibilities for linking private, public, and personal money and services in new ways; together, that signals societal as well as financial innovation. New common interests grow around the platform and can take on a life of their own.

To stay within the planetary boundaries, we have to take responsibility, and this includes designers. This requires new perspectives on design. In this work, we focus on a co-design project with indigenous communities. Within such communities, indigenous knowledge is central. Indigenous knowledge acknowledges that the world is alive and that we, as humans, are merely a small part. Central in our approach is Sheehan's respectful design, which ensures a central place for indigenous knowledge in the design process. However, Sheehan's approach does not state in pragmatic terms how such a design approach can be achieved. Some of the co-design processes we engaged in led to respectful design spaces, others did not. This helped us to identify patterns of dynamics that are essential for respectful design. At the core of our findings lies the observation that in order to reach a respectful design space, in which indigenous knowledge is embedded, a shared dialogical space between community and designer is essential.

Design has become a global activity dominated by one set of cultural interests to produce a consistency of practice. This essay uses an experience of design for social innovation in northern Finland, inspired by land and place, to speculate upon the dimensions across which plurality in designing could be embraced in an increasingly globalized world. Informed by discussions while helping to run the Design and Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific events of 2016, it uses Kasulis' analysis of cultural orientation and his insight that a key difference underpinning cultures is how people may orientate towards intimacy and integrity. It then explores what a form of intimate design might look like. In doing so, it uses Ingold's study of North-ness to challenge totalizing narratives of progress and explore what a marginal view can offer to address site-specific needs and dispense with design orthodoxies.

In this panel, we will engage with the conference's membership and friends to consider directions for the possible futures of practice-centered computing. This panel is not targeting or aiming to result in a single, agreed "universal” vision, nor to ask for a shared vision among the panelists and the audience. Rather, we offer several and diverse vision statements by distinguished and innovative ECSCW scholars, being experts in their specific domain or context of research. These statements will be necessarily incomplete until the ECSCW membership has joined the discussion, offering their own, additional visions of the futures of the field. With this, the panel aims to engage in a discussion that foresees exciting future research directions for the field of ECSCW but likewise also unveils potential hurdles the community might face.

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site marked and haunted (Tsing et al., 2017) by the aftermath of industrial design practices and hope, by making time for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in a community-supported agricultural scheme. The paper invites you to share some cruxes and insights that emerged, and to imagine teaching with care as a collective process that attempts to bring things together, not as oppositions, but as generative and productive relations.

The "sharing economy" has promised more sustainable use of the world's finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of managing idle capacity with the merits of collective local agency bred by caring-based sharing in a locality. Drawing on two studies of neighbourhood sharing in London and analysis of the meshing of local sharing initiatives, we ask how "relational assets' form and build up over time in a neighbourhood, and how a platform of platforms might act as local socio-technical infrastructure to sustain alternative economies and different models of trust to those found in the scaling sharing economy. We close by proposing digital networks of support for local solidarity and resourcefulness, showing how CSCW knowledge on coordination and collaboration has a role in achieving these ends.

If municipalities were the caring platforms of the 19-20th century sharing economy, how does care manifest in civic structures of the current period? We consider how platforms – from the local initiatives of communities transforming neighbourhoods, to the city, in the form of the local authority – are involved, trusted and/or relied on the design of shared services and amenities for the public good. We use contrasting cases of interaction between local government and civil society organisations in Sweden and the UK to explore trends in public service provision. We look at how care can manifest between state and citizens and at the roles that co-design and co-learning play in developing contextually sensitive opportunities for caring platforms. In this way, we seek to learn from platforms in transition about the importance of co-learning in political and structural contexts and make recommendations for the co-design of (digital) platforms to care with and for civil society.

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. Our conclusion is that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.

The poet George MacKay Brown (1921-1996) lived most of his life in Orkney and dedicated his life’s work to the poetry he saw in an island shaped by its people and a people shaped by their island. In his book An Orkney Tapestry, originally published in 1969, he returns, time and again, to the analogy of the loom and the tapestry to describe the islands. As in the quote above, where he describes the “different estates [...] stitched together in a single garment”, he also refers to the islands as a tapestry woven by history, people and things. The Orkney with which we concern ourselves in this paper is still Brown’s Orkney; it is still a place of almost indefinable integrity and its history still has an undeniable presence. In this paper, we look at the growth and impact of socio-material power infrastructures, in and around Orkney, over the past thirty years, based on two visits to observe, solicit diverse perspectives upon and study the development of “community energy” (Smith et al., 2016; Seyfang et al., 2013). We use onshore wind turbines as an inquiry into how the tapestry of Orkney is interwoven with the Scottish mainland, the UK and Westminster. By tracing the development of renewable energy here, we offer the reader an account of local control and agency, in response to the SHAPE ENERGY ‘control’ challenge. In bringing a historical socio-technical inquiry to bear on energy production and local control, we draw attention, also, to the language of our account and, indeed, any account that deals with power supplies. The word ‘power’ comes to English from the Latin, via Old French, meaning ‘ability to act or do’. ‘Energy’, ‘agency’ and ‘control’ also relate to the means to perform actions and alter states. In this account, we juxtapose the ethereality of electricity, with its technical power to enact change through chemistry in ways determined by physics, with the equally immaterial flows of power that arise in the socio-technical sphere of erecting wind turbines, seeing the history of control of energy in Orkney as a meeting – and intertwining – of these technical and socio-technical factors, playing through the material infrastructure of cables, turbines, batteries and the grid.