Communities and Technologies

The rapid development of non-ownership economic models, known as collaborative consumption or “sharing economy”, enables people to temporarily access and experience shared resources, such as housing, fertile land, vehicles, and everyday things. Interactive technologies and systems are often used to facilitate access to shared resources and provide efficient access to these resources for a monetary fee or another form of compensation. Beyond well-known commercial enterprises such as Uber or Airbnb, an increasing amount of community groups and organizations have formed collections and libraries of shared things (e.g., tool and equipment coops) to leverage the collaborative use of various resources (e.g., woodworking spaces, solidarity agriculture co-ops, fab labs). This emerging phenomenon is often called “platform cooperativism”, where network-driven organizations within a local community prioritize environmental, social, and cultural values over economic gain.

We have been studying various sharing economy models and organizations using qualitative research methods in HCI. We are especially interested in community-oriented approaches to the collaborative economy to understand how interactive technologies and platforms can better support community members' processes and their technology-mediated practices attuning to their aspirations, requirements, and needs when it comes to user experience, privacy, trust, participation, and social interactions. We also widely adopt a design-oriented approach in HCI to inform and inspire not only physical and digital innovations (e.g., platform design) in this space but also design and develop tailored translational resources (e.g., design toolkits) for design practitioners to facilitate domain-specific knowledge transfer from research to practice.

Some of the communities we have worked with in the past are the Vancouver Tool Library (Vancouver, Canada), Pumpipumpe sharing community (Switzerland), and Sharely online marketplace (Switzerland).

The translational resources we have developed in this context are

• The Sharing Economy Design Cards
• The Sharing-Sustainability-Fairness Toolkit

• Dr. Anton Fedosov
• Prof. Elaine M. Huang

1. Anton Fedosov, Özge Subaşı, Lisa Ochsenbein, and Elaine Huang. (2022) Supporting Designers in the Sharing Economy Through a Generative Design Cards Toolkit. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 498–504. doi:10.1145/3527927.3535203

2. Anton Fedosov, Liudmila Zavolokina, Sina Krumhard, and Elaine Huang. (2022) Toward unpacking trust in a local sharing economy community. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Privacy-friendly and Trustworthy Technology for Society – COST Action CA19121 - Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living, doi:10.5281/zenodo.6823362

3. Airi Lampinen, Ann Light, Chiara Rossitto, Anton Fedosov, Chiara Bassetti, Aniko Bernat, Penny Travlou, and Gabriela Avram. (2022) Processes of Proliferation: Impact Beyond Scaling in Sharing and Collaborative Economies. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, GROUP, Article 41 (January 2022), 22 pages. doi:10.1145/3492860, pdf

4. Myriam Lewkowicz, Susanne Bødker, Alexander Boden and Anton Fedosov (2021) Technical Design and Development of Future Platforms, White Paper, WG2 Platforms for the Collaborative Economy Deliverable, CA16121 Sharing and Caring COST Action, pdf, url

5. Özge Subaşı, Anton Fedosov and Oliver Bates. (2021) Mapping the Landscape of Sharing and Cooperativism for Design Research and Practice. In Becoming a Platform in Europe – On the Governance of the Collaborative Economy by M. Teli and C. Bassetti (Eds). pp. 286–310. Now Publishers. doi:10.1561/9781680838411.ch13

6. Anton Fedosov, Mervin Cheok and Elaine Huang. (2021) Designing for Local Economies of Personal Artifacts. In: Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies. doi:10.18420/ecscw2021_p06, pdf

7. Anton Fedosov, Airi Lampinen, William Odom, and Elaine M. Huang (2021) A Dozen Stickers on a Mailbox: Physical Encounters and Digital Interactions in a Local Sharing Community. Proceedings of ACM Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 4, No. CSCW3. CSCW ’20, 23 pages. ACM Press, Article 240. url, doi:10.1145/3432939

8. Anton Fedosov and Marc Langheinrich (2021) A Note on the Emerging Landscape of the Sharing Economy in Switzerland. In The Collaborative Economy in Action: European Perspectives by A. Klimczuk, V. Česnuitytė, and G. Avram (Eds.), pp. 330–339. Limerick, Ireland: University of Limerick. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5574108, url

9. Anton Fedosov, Elaine M. Huang (2020) Exploring the Role of Digital Tools in a Low-Tech Local Sharing Community. Workshop Proceedings on “Studying Technical Mechanisms for Supporting Sharing Communities“ at the 18th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), url

10. Anton Fedosov, Masako Kitazaki, William Odom, Marc Langheinrich (2019) Sharing Economy Design Cards, Proceedings of the 2019 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, url, doi:10.1145/3290605.3300375

11. Anton Fedosov, William Odom, Marc Langheinrich, Ron Wakkary (2018) Roaming Objects: Encoding Digital Histories of Use into Shared Objects and Tools, Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 - DIS '18, p. 1141-1153, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, url, doi:10.1145/3196709.3196722 pdf