This workshop took place on April 18th in Seoul as part of CHI 2015 (http://chi2015.acm.org/). Details of participation can be found here: https://designforsharing.com/chiworkshop/call-for-papers.

Introduction

The Sharing Economy has brought new attention to the everyday practice of sharing. Digital tools are changing both what we can do together across neighbourhoods and how we think about sharing our time, materials and skills. It is possible to design to boost resource management, economic wellbeing and social resilience by fostering sharing practices, but do different designs speak to different priorities in design for sharing?

This workshop will discuss and create imaginative futures of how can we design for sharing based on civic and peer engagement in the local. We will discuss and elaborate concepts for sharing that retain knowledge, expertise and abilities of citizens to perform exchange of favours in barter-like ways in the local community. We imagine a future of reciprocal sharing and exchange of professional and voluntary services. The need and opportunity for innovative sharing thinking is underpinned by a number of strong, enabling drivers including societal and economic macro trends, recent findings on the positive effects of prolonged professional activity and voluntary work by seniors, and enabling ICT interfaces and networking tools.

Motivations and drivers behind sharing and how the sharing affects the people involved needs to be discussed. We already see several conflicts of values related to the good neighbourhood or good citizenship versus commercial interests related to sharing concepts playing out in media all over the world. We need to address such value conflicts and discuss what we can learn in terms of designing for positive sustainable sharing practices of citizenship in local communities.

The workshop reviews sharing from a social, economic and environmental sustainability perspective, discussing how social cohesion as well as resource exploitation are fostered, and presenting examples of the nuanced work of local initiatives based in the examples of sharing practices (existing or imagined) submitted by workshop participants.

Full workshop proposal with references can be found here.