This article investigates teachers' lived experiences of an online professional development (OPD) course in Denmark - that is, Teknosofikum - through a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective, and it relies on the interpretive analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews. The article's contribution focuses on the theme of 'time' and highlights it as a multifaceted construct that plays a relevant role in learning. By relying on the ideas of temporal structuring and multiple temporalities, the article shows that OPD courses and HE teachers' engagement nest themselves into pre-existing and complex nexus of commitments and duties, each of which has its own temporality and rhythm, along with longer-term aspirations for pedagogical development. As time emerged as a relevant aspect characterizing OPD course design and HE teachers' experiences, the article provides simple recommendations for 'time-aware' OPD courses.

In the following critique, we attempt to engage with, reflect upon, and problematize how we might care for the commons by opening a discursive space for us as researchers to be touched by our troubled presence in a world rapidly moving towards a number of far-from equilibrium tipping points. We will do this in relation to our (the three authors’) experiences with a particular area of Copenhagen: Amager Fælled (in English ‘Amager Common’). Our text, the result of an experimental and undisciplined collaborative writing project, adopts a posthuman epistemology and is an implicit critique of solutionist ways of conceiving participative computing where the dichotomies between e.g. agency-structure, body-mind and research subjects-objects can be easily identified and used. By linking our three vignettes of personal encounters with a specific common and its associated commoning practices, we show our different personal and affective relationship to Amager Fælled. Through them we interweave our private and professional selves and reflect on our positioning with regards to immediate and future ecological concerns towards more sustainable futures in HCI and design. By weaving together bodily felt experiences, technological engagements, and theoretical perspectives, we aim towards cultivating an agenda for future research and activation that both resonates with existing research in HCI and design and hopefully opens new discussions and research trajectories.

This workshop explores and reflects upon both how relational ontologies can support design processes that target commons and commoning as outcomes, and how commons and commoning can work as speculative lenses for the understanding of relationality in Participatory Design. Here, we invite the PD community to engage with questions such as: how do we embrace and rely upon relationality when designing collectively and in a participatory manner within more-than-human ensembles? How do we become commoners and what do we nurture in common? What do we lose and what do we gain by considering commons with a keen eye on relationality? Which kind of relational qualities are essential for commoning design and designing commons? In short, “Relationality, commoning, and designing” aims to be a venue for critically supporting alternative and more sustainable futures for all (not only humans) by means of participatory designing and commoning.

Following recent developments in commons studies centred on commoning as a practice, this work takes special interest in commoners’ lived experiences, desires, expectations, and struggles as they relate to sustaining a commitment to such practices over time. The article adopts a micropractice perspective focused on commoners’ privileged vantage point to observe how multiple heterogeneous practices overlap and intersect in the mundane life of commoning and how, in turn, a necessary condition to continue commoning is to unearth ways through this nexus of practices. Empirically, the article is grounded in the analysis of twenty-five semistructured interviews with long-term commoners recruited from three different commoning realms, and it advances the concept of carving out the when/where of commoning: a situated and relational type of boundary work that commoners continuously perform and reproduce when committing (or trying to commit) to commoning. As such, the article contributes to commons studies by starting to unravel commoners’ everyday struggle to commit to and perform commoning.

In this article, we lever onmatters of concern(MoC) as a way to reflect on the articulation of collaborative design processes. We do this by focusing on an international project for the development of an ICT platform for energy management at the household and housing cooperative levels. We analyse retrospectively how the project development process captured and accompanied several MoC in two piloting areas, where all authors were directly involved. Our work contributes to the body of knowledge that builds on Science and Technology Studies scholarship to enrich the understanding of complex design processes. In particular, the paper goes beyond a descriptive take on MoC and provides ontological and methodological considerations on the use of user stories. Ultimately, the paper argues that scaffolding tools, such as user stories, can capture and convey MoC, and they can facilitate a transparent process of actor-networks alignment and emergence.

This work finds its place within Participatory Design (PD) as a specific approach to co-design that focuses on the politics of technological innovation and socio-technical transformations. In particular, the article contributes to the repositioning of co-design in the age of platform capitalism by engaging with the question: how can participatory designers approach interventions for the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons? As the contradictions and limitations of platform capitalism become increasingly evident, to engage with such a challenge is a way to pursue PD's renewed political agenda. The article foregrounds the concept of platforms as commons to bring designers' attention towards those platform arrangements which are antithetical to platform capitalism exploitative ones. By building on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), as a paradigmatic case of platform as commons, the article outlines participation, infrastructure, and governance as relevant perspectives for framing broad areas of sustainability concerns; and it articulates them along four approaches for supporting long-term sustainability in practice: maintaining, scaling, replicating, and evolving. Ultimately, this article provides participatory designers with a map of possible orientations to frame and support their work, research or interventions around the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons.

In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components-people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind-that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.

This exploratory paper examines the relationship between Participatory Design (PD) and Sustainability as it emerges from the Participatory Design Conference (PDC). The reinvigorated political agenda of PD, together with the enlargements of its application domains and scopes of interest, calls for reinvigorating the early concerns of the field for long-term, durable, and positive change. The objective of this paper is to explore what "sustainability" means in and for the field. The study is based on a literature review of the PDC Proceedings and it provides both an outline of the structural aspects of the literature and a mapping of three use patterns of the concept: PD for Sustainability; Sustainability of PD Practice; and Sustainability of PD Results. Based on our interpretation of these patterns we also provide a general definition of sustainability. We believe the findings of this paper can support PD scholars in conceptualizing sustainability and to position their works in relation to it.

The ethical and sustainable production and consumption of energy are becoming increasingly important with the ongoing transformation and decentralization of the energy system. For other kinds of goods and commodities ethical consumption have direct implications for, and the participation of, informed citizens. Due to its intangibility, energy lacks the same levels of reflection and intervention by citizens and those aspects are yet to be fully explored in practice.This paper contributes to the understanding of how energy justice might be approached. We reflect on an empirical experience of participatory energy budgeting, a process aimed at determining how to redistribute a share of energy linked to collective virtuous consumption behaviors.We analyze through a qualitative thematic analysis how participants make sense of the participatory energy budgeting process and the emerged dynamics within the local communities and how this process can strive to reconfigure the relationship among civil society, the energy sector and politics, in order to remediate injustices. We highlight how the construction-in-practice of energy justice in a local community might be closely linked to issues such as the form of energy governance that allows for the participation of citizens and the accountability of the process, policies and technological limitations.

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Participatory Design has recently seen growing interest in developing critical forms of reflexivity able to disentangle the complexity of participatory ensembles. This article makes a methodological contribution to this endeavour. Drawing on socio-cognitive analyses of collaborative design, it proposes the frame of interaction spaces' as a scaffolding tool for conducting retrospective analyses of participatory design processes. The paper uses the interaction spaces' frame to analyse the three years of collaborative activities of the CIVIS Project. Through a longitudinal and multi-dimensional account of participatory dynamics involved in the designing, prototyping and testing of an IT platform for home energy management, the frame evidences how participatory configurations evolve over time; it makes clearer the characteristics of participation as partial and overtaken; and it identifies moments of cross-participation as potential basis for the boundary-spanning of design issues.

Thanks to renewable energies the decentralized energy system model is becoming more relevant in the production and distribution of energy. The scenario is important in order to achieve a successful energy transition. This paper presents a reflection on the ongoing experience of infrastructuring a sociotechnical system in which local communities can manage renewable energies as a Common Pool Resources. We explore how to create a space for citizens' participation in a continuous process of design for energy management. Objectives of the paper are: i) to clarify how Participatory Design could support the sustainability and the effectiveness of an alternative, ii) to present an experimentation with renewable energy as CPR as an alternative model to the actual vision of the energy system. Preliminary results reported in this paper suggest that a Participatory Design process can be valuable for communities in order to establish new energy management models.