Chiara Rossitto

It has been a while since my last post. Hard to keep track with everything that is going. Starting this fall, I’ll be a faculty member for the the Rich and Healthy Life working group at Digital Futures research centre. I’m very excited about this activity and honoured by the invitation.

For the third consecutive year, I’ll serve as AC for the “Critical Computing, Sustainability, and Social Justice Subcommittee” at CHI. I hope this area of research will keep on developing, including more and more computing within more and more complex societal issues.

Understanding, Promoting, and Designing for Sustainable Appropriation of Technologies by Grassroots Communities. Towards a new wave of technologichttps://2021.comtech.community/program/al activism

On June 21 and 22, Maurizio Teli, Myriam Lewkovicz, Susanne Bødker and myself, will be hosting this interesting workshop at Communities and Technologies 2021.

Technological development and adoption are characterized by historical waves, reflecting both technical advancements and social transformations in mutually constitutive relation. Today, we are in the middle of another of these waves characterized, for instance, by the widespread focus on AI and other emerging technologies. In this context, activists and designers are constructively appropriating these emerging technologies, thus showing how socio-technical aspects of technological design, development, and implementation, contribute to ongoing transformations of power relations, life conditions, and our collective future. This workshop aims at bringing together C&T researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, promoting, and designing forms of sustainable appropriation of contemporary technologies by grassroots communities. With sustainable appropriation, we refer to a wider concept of sustainability including ecological and social aspects, as presented for example in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Registering to CHI this year was odd and it felt like an official goodbye to Yokohama. While waiting to see you all on Zoom, here come the abstracts of two papers I have co-authored.

Katie Berns, Chiara Rossitto, and Jakob Tholander. 2021. Queuing for Waste: Sociotechnical Interactions within a Food Sharing Community. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445059

This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how – through the work of volunteers – surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community’s activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers’ concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events.

Jakob Tholander, Chiara Rossitto, Asreen Rostami, Yoshio Ishiguro, Takashi Miyaki, and Jun Rekimoto. 2021. Design in Action: Unpacking the Artists’ Role in Performance-Led Research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445056

This paper illustrates design work carried out to develop an interactive theater performance. HCI has started to address the challenges of designing interactive performances, as both audience and performers’ experiences are considered and a variety of professional expertise involved. Nevertheless, research has overlooked how such design unfolds in practice, and what role artists play in exploring both the creative opportunities and the challenges associated with interweaving digital technologies. A two-day workshop was conducted to tailor the use of the ChameleonMask, a telepresence technology, within a performance. The analysis highlights the artists’ work to make the mask work while framing, exploring and conceptualizing its use. The discussion outlines the artists’ skills and design expertise, and how they redefine the role of HCI in performance-led research.

Do you work with community-led, grassroots initiatives and are interested in problematising common understandings of what constitutes scale? Join our workshop on October 17/18, 2020

This one-day workshop invites discussion on the various socio-technical processes and dynamics that characterise 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; and ii) 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. 

The last book discussed at our lovely book club.

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

Last week I was in Edinburgh for two Caring&Sharing COST Action meetings and for the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference. Both events were interesting and truly committed to bringing together European research on the Collaborative Economy and community-led initiatives. The conference proceedings can be found here. Looking forward to meeting again old and new friends/colleagues I met there.

New paper out, co-authored with Katie Berns

Abstract. This paper investigates the practices and dynamics of a grassroots initiative that takes a non-monetary sharing approach to the issue of food surplus. Food sharing Copenhagen (FS-CPH) is a community-led, volunteer-run organisation working towards reducing food waste by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, bakeries, and private individuals and redistributing it locally, for free. The analysis illustrates the practices of the three main working groups within the organisation, the role of technology within the organization, and how food is framed through a community economies approach.

The paper will be presented at the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference and can be found here.

New paper out , co-authored with Airi Lampinen and Christofer Gradin Franzén.

Abstract. In this paper, we reflect on how scaling out – recreating and reconfiguring horizontally the most promising practices across contexts (Manzini, 2015) – can help local, grassroots initiatives to grow in a socially sustainable fashion and to sustain their action over time. We ground our discussion on the case of Hoffice, a self-organizing network that is experimenting with an alternative social model for collectively organizing and supporting flexible forms of work. In a prior ethnographic study of the Hoffice network (Rossitto & Lampinen, 2018), we outlined the socio-technical practices and values that characterise this community. We complement this previous piece by zooming in on the community’s struggles in the face of rapid growth. We conclude by proposing a way to rethink the challenges that growth can pose.

The paper will be presented at the Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies Conference, and can be found here.

Last week Michael Muller and I sent out the first-round notifications for ECSCW 2019. For the last two editions the conference has adopted a journal model, and articles are published in the CSCW journal. Out of the 64 submitted articles, about half were invited to be resubmitted, and many will hopefully qualify for final acceptance. I’m very excited by the number of very interesting manuscripts I have read and how, if accepted, they could deepen and expand ECSCW research – this is also the best reward for the incredible amount of work that has gone into this process. The Program Committee members have also done an amazing and valuable job with the high quality reviews and comments they have provided the authors with. The community is indebted to them for their effort during a very busy and stressful time of the year, as December usually is, and for the scientific rigour, the politeness and sense of care I have seen in many reviews. 

Stay tuned and keep an eye open for the final program! 

Thanks to Mauro Cherubini who invited me to the University of Lausanne, Department of Information System,  to present the work on Hoffice. Meeting Mauro and his team was very interesting, and I was happy to share my work with a new group of colleagues.

As the Swedih autumn gets darker and darker, we have receivded the very good news that our project proposal “Sketching with Frictions: Designing Mixed-Reality Experiences with VR”, lead by Asreen Rostami, got  funded by Stockholm University. We have received 100 000 SEK  to start a research collaboration between DSV/SU and Rekimoto Lab and VR research centre at the University of Tokyo. Looking forward to this new adventure.