HCI and CSCW have a long-standing interest in the consequences of digital transformation for work practices. A key part of this is its impact on labour relations. While prior HCI studies have examined labour relations in domains such as platform work, few have looked at industrial settings. This paper presents an ethnographic study of works councils in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Germany. Works councils exemplify the principle of Co-Determination, which is the right of employees to participate in the design and management of their workplace and play a vital role in vetting new technologies whenever they imply changes in work practices. A number of issues confront works councils when they attempt to accomplish this, namely a lack of time, knowledge, and external support. We discuss these issues and consider their implications for both design and the constitution of workplace democracy in future industrial settings.

Previous CSCW research has paid increasing attention to regional innovation systems providing the context for CSCW research and design. In this paper we provide insights into attempts to intervene in such a regional innovation system via practice-oriented activities. Our findings describe experiences of co-creating knowledge around digitization of SMEs on a regional level, beyond individual company contexts. We reflect on the benefits and challenges such an approach affords and highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships and similarities between practices in different contexts to enable intended but also initially unexpected knowledge spillovers. Our findings highlight how a praxeological approach to CSCW can be influential in regional development programs, and open this field to CSCW research and design. We draw out lessons for similar interventions and outline fruitful avenues for future research.

Forests across the world play a crucial role in the fight against the climate catastrophe as well as mass extinction that characterise the Anthropocene. However, they are also increasingly threatened by destructive human practices such as agriculture and mining, but also climate change itself. This article focuses on forests in Germany, which have been devastated in recent years by heat, drought and bark beetles. Hence, forests and associated forestry practices are in urgent need of adaptation to a different climate. Several digital applications have been developed to assist with this effort. Adaptation is complicated by the epistemological challenge of climate change, that the uncertainty of how exactly climate change will affect specific local sites, as well as future markets for forest products, poses. In this short paper we review how two applications address this uncertainty in their approach to supporting the climate adaptation of forests and draw out preliminary lessons for HCI research and design.

There has been a growing body of work on migration within the HCI community, as well as within the social science and public policy communities. More specifically, human-centered security researchers have been exploring the needs and concerns of migrants, starting to contend with the harms created by digital technologies and experienced by those who are and have been marginalized. Case studies through which migration and (digital) security within the HCI domain intersect have been localized to specific contexts such as, e.g., particular issues related to data processing and sharing in refugee camps, or a narrow set of security threats and harms experienced by migrant workers in their new places of work. However, more holistic approaches to understanding the intersections of migration and (digital) security are yet to be fully explored while accounting for the past (including home country security practices, use of localized digital technologies, and interactions with technologies throughout the migration journey), the present (current security practices and experiences in the place or country migrants are situated), and the future migrants are trying to secure for themselves and their families. This workshop aims to build a community of HCI researchers interested in how migration and (digital) security intersect to braid together research narratives, perspectives, and methods, design for inclusive technologies, and build an agenda for future research and practice.

This study explores the global phenomenon of migration at the local, neighborhood level of a mid-sized city in Germany. Focusing on a long-term interactive storytelling-initiative, it studies the emergence of Arrival Literacy as a bi-directional skill-set. It describes the development of individual, local responses to global migration consequences, among both newcomers who migrated, as well as long-term citizens who never moved. The analytic lens of Arrival Literacy brings forward the complexity and difficulties of the arrival process, where the individual is navigating the consequences of political decisions that were made at a broader level. Digital storytelling as an element is a method to 1) creatively develop a skill of expression for one's own positionality, and 2) to connect with the positionalities of others, thus supporting the process of dealing with arrival at the local community level and beyond.

Forests across the world play a crucial role in the fight against the climate catastrophe as well as mass extinction that characterise the Anthropocene. However, they are also increasingly threatened by destructive human practices such as agriculture and mining, but also climate change itself. This article focuses on forests in Germany, which have been devastated in recent years by heat, drought and bark beetles. Hence, forests and associated forestry practices are in urgent need of adaptation to a different climate. Several digital applications have been developed to assist with this effort. Adaptation is complicated by the epistemological challenge of climate change, that the uncertainty of how exactly climate change will affect specific local sites, as well as future markets for forest products, poses. In this short paper we review how two applications address this uncertainty in their approach to supporting the climate adaptation of forests and draw out preliminary lessons for HCI research and design.

Sustainability has never been more critical for DIS researchers. Within the DIS and HCI community, the term has multiple meanings: In sustainable HCI, it frequently refers to ecologically sustainable lifestyles through the design of interactive systems and to sustainability in HCI practice itself. Conversely, community-based HCI speaks of the sustainability of HCI, referring to the longevity of our socio-technical interventions. This workshop seeks to bring together these seemingly different conceptions of sustainability to explore their commonalities. Arguably, longevity is important for sustainable HCI, as is ecological impact for community-based HCI. We invite participants from diverse fields, such as sustainable HCI, HCI4D, Community-Based Participatory Design, and Digital Civics to reflect on past and current work, develop best practice recommendations, and design sustainability roadmaps to help researchers and designers to conceive, run, and evaluate future projects with sustainability through, in, and of HCI in mind.

The coordination of maintenance work in manufacturing poses a crucial productivity factor in small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) but often seems to be rather neglected in practice as well as in much of the literature on maintenance. We shed light upon maintenance coordination work by presenting a design case study conducted in an SME over approximately two years. We took a participatory design-oriented approach, involving all roles on the shopfloor affected by maintenance work. In three major iterations during the pre-study, a release-ready prototype was developed and implemented by the users over the course of one year. The evaluation of the tool showed how a new and mostly unintended practice of information flow, error reporting, and prioritization emerged such that, for instance, foremen becoming a central node of communication, formal prioritization shifting away from higher management, and actual prioritization being done by maintainers. This paper contributes to the body of CSCW work on maintenance practice in SMEs by presenting detailed empirical findings on the coordination work of maintainers, as well as the evaluation of socio-technical interventions into maintenance practices.

Forests and their management practices are under considerable pressure to adapt to a changing climate. This study reports on early results on the adaptation of forests and forestry practices in Europe. Our study confirms the social and situated nature of forestry and climate adaption and found that the absence of appropriate knowledge and the multi-actor nature of the forest are central challenges for the necessary adaptation. These challenges are well known to HCI research and resonate with approaches to knowledge management and participation of multiple actors in design. The forest however also challenges existing approaches in return. This makes the forest a site not just for urgent action to realise its role in climate mitigation, but also for the production of HCI knowledge.

Within Participatory- and Co-Design projects, the issue of sustainability and maintenance of the co-designed artefacts is a crucial yet largely unresolved issue. In this paper, we look back on four years of work on co-designing tools that assist refugees and migrants in their efforts to settle in Germany, the last of which the project has been independently maintained by our community collaborators. We reflect on the role of pre-existing care practices amongst our community collaborators, and a continued openness throughout the project, that allowed a complex constellation of actors to be involved in its ongoing maintenance and our own, often mundane activities which have contributed to the sustainability of the results. Situating our account within an HCI for Social Justice agenda, we thereby contribute to an ongoing discussion about the sustainability of such activities.

Who is an activist? With the advent of activism-related scholarship in HCI and CSCW, the current challenge involves thinking about what activism is, who an activist is, and the opportunities and limitations of activism. Recently, researchers in academia and industry, such as Timnit Gebru, demonstrate a commitment to stay activated for the structural changes we need, for example, diverse and inclusive scholarship, to address overlapping problems, e.g., sexism, racism, and tokenism. Additionally, there is a continuing dominance of Western, formally educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) perspectives. Countering this requires collective efforts in citational justice and decolonial computing, among others. But such complex issues do not yet cover the inner conflicts that we face, such as mental health struggles while dismantling the prejudices stemming from the ivory tower, locating our privileges as academics while traversing less privileged locales of research sites, or the dilemmas on whether we are doing enough to fulfill our responsibilities to the people who have trusted us enough to work with us in the face of "publish or perish" culture. This workshop explores what activism means within the CSCW community and how we can remain activated while harboring doubts and hopes in calling ourselves "activists".

It is sometimes argued that there is hardly a place in the world in the 21st century left untouched by global capitalism [111, 112]. Even so, some places remain at the periphery, participating in this system without being fully absorbed by it. In this article, we take a detailed look at the economic life of such a "pericapitalist" [161] community in the Brazilian Amazon region. We detail how the community increasingly participates in global systems and supply chains, yet also organizes economic life around local and traditional values. We pay special attention to the role of digital technologies in the community, including mobile phones and internet. The contribution of the article is as follows: firstly, it provides a detailed analysis of the material practices of a community at the edge. Secondly, it draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of responses to global capitalism, formed from the relationship between specific material practices, new technology, and elements of cultural identity. Thirdly, it argues for an increased sensibility towards these different relations to capitalism when considering design implications. We argue that close attention to material practice goes some way towards resolving those tensions and, further, provides for an appeal to a more pluralistic views of culture and development [61].

An increasing number of people around the world are forced to leave their homes due to the climate catastrophe, regional conflict or poverty. In their new host countries however, refugees and migrants are frequently met by a wide range of challenges, including wider societal participation. The difficulties migrants and refugees face have also increasingly become the topic of HCI and CSCW work. In this paper we report on a three year-long project, involving refugees, migrants and activist supporters in a co-design project to develop tools that aid the process of resettling. Several aspects have challenged equal participation in the project, including divergent motives, unequal power distribution and cultural heterogeneity. Despite these challenges the project outcomes are in use and maintained beyond the project runtime through voluntary actors. We reflect on this discrepancy between process and outcome drawing on the concept of care.

It is sometimes argued that there is hardly a place in the world in the 21st century left untouched by global capitalism [111, 112]. Even so, some places remain at the periphery, participating in this system without being fully absorbed by it. In this article, we take a detailed look at the economic life of such a “pericapitalist” [161] community in the Brazilian Amazon region. We detail how the community increasingly participates in global systems and supply chains, yet also organizes economic life around local and traditional values. We pay special attention to the role of digital technologies in the community, including mobile phones and internet. The contribution of the article is as follows: firstly, it provides a detailed analysis of the material practices of a community at the edge . Secondly, it draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of responses to global capitalism, formed from the relationship between specific material practices, new technology, and elements of cultural identity. Thirdly, it argues for an increased sensibility towards these different relations to capitalism when considering design implications. We argue that close attention to material practice goes some way towards resolving those tensions and, further, provides for an appeal to a more pluralistic views of culture and development [61].

Various concepts have attempted to capture the nature of the contemporary political-economic system of globalised capitalism and its disastrous consequences for the planet, including World System Analysis or the Capitalocene.Especially Decolonial thinkers see its roots in colonialism.The resulting modernity/coloniality structures many aspects of human life everywhere, including gender identities, relationships amongst humans and with nature.Technology plays a vital part, requiring reflections on how HCI researchers can react to these challenges.In a class of an HCI master program, we have attempted to jointly begin to understand HCI's role in the capitalocene by studying relevant concepts and empirically investigating specific local yet connected phenomena.With participants being distributed across the globe, we were able to study different shared yet locally specific phenomena inspired by multisited ethnography.In this paper, we report on the structure and experience of the class as well as our findings.

In this paper, we present an account of how FARC-EP ex-combatants are using digital technology in the process of reincorporating into Colombian society. We report findings showing how this technology mediates the difficult task of transitioning from a culture of opposition to civilian members and active political actors. Using the concept of social capital as a framework, we investigate the intersection between the use of digital tools and developing cultural and economic practices among these groups during this transitional period. Reflecting on the bonding and bridging aspects of social capital, we describe how ex-combatants draw on substantial social capital from their former lives as a guerrilla army in order to strengthen their position in these new circumstances, and their cautious and difficult creation of new social ties with wider Colombian society. We contribute to the CSCW discourse by discussing the crucial role digital tools, previously not available to these groups, play in sustaining, re-growing and building social capital of communities in post-conflict periods.

In recent years HCI and CSCW work has increasingly begun to address complex social problems and issues of social justice worldwide. Such activist-leaning work is not without problems. Through the experiences and reflections of an activist becoming academic and an academic becoming an activist, we outline these difficulties such as (1) the risk of perpetuating violence, oppression and exploitation when working with marginalised communities, (2) the reception of activist-academic work within our academic communities, and (3) problems of social justice that exist within our academic communities. Building on our own experiences, practices and existing literature from a variety of disciplines we advocate for the possibility of an activist-academic practice, outline possible ways forward and formulate questions we need to answer for HCI to contribute to a more just world.

Our global livelihoods are intrinsically tied to mining. The technologies we use, as currently designed, are not possible without the minerals and metals that are an essential part of several of their components. As a result, HCI research and applications are tightly dependent on mining, including the negative environmental and social impacts resulting from it. This paper aims to describe and reflect on this problematic entanglement as a ”wicked cycle.” We present a dilemma faced by communities living near mining sites in the Amazon, which are affected by the ecological impacts of mining and rely on digital technologies made with such mines’ products, including telecommunication technologies, to effectively and successfully advocate for and realise their own local visions of development. We promote a discussion built on concepts from decolonial thinking and critical sustainability. With this paper, we want to create space and necessity to acknowledge our complicity as HCI researchers in this dilemma and propose a series of questions to reflect on our part in these specific, and other, wicked cycles.