Designing Alternative Systems for Local Communities

Abstract

Alternative systems ranging from self-organized skill sharing to alternative micro-economies have been critical channels of community engagement and bonding. Technology is increasingly playing a role in the way people connect to these services at the (hyper)local level. While there has been considerable research on designing technology to support conventional, established systems of community organization and governance; mobile and ubiquitous technologies offer strong potential for alternative systems to be established in the local level. Do It Yourself (DIY) and maker movements are enabling grassroots activist groups to develop their own technologies or to hack existing tools to support bottom-up systems of self-organization, democracy and commerce. Based on these trends and the recent worldwide economic, political and societal crisis, this workshop will bring together researchers, practitioners and activists to re-envision how HCI tools can support alternative systems of local civic engagement.

This Changes Sustainable HCI

“…Many of these works propose new design sensibilities: for example, considering whether technology disproportionately benefits a particular class of people [27], or democratizing technological production [99]. Others propose designing to support positive and just economic transactions [13,34,54,106], or supporting various agents on the ground who "seek to transform existing social arrangements, such as the norms of increasing economic growth and maximizing shareholder returns without regard to ecological or social consequences" [91] (cf. [12]).…”