Beyond Interaction toward Cooperation and Commoning

The rich traditions of cooperation and commoning offer many ways to understand our shared relationships to land, ecosystems, and each other, while also providing frameworks for mutual response. This workshop explores how theory and practice regarding cooperatives and the commons can change our relationship to the designed world and address the exploitative systems of technology that surround us. By convening a broad community of HCI scholars and practitioners, we will co-create a zine to explore these themes and identify a prospective research agenda. This workshop brings together a nascent research community to learn about the relationship between cooperative practices and forms of commoning, explore how both can inform design, and map out equitable and community-driven approaches to governance and use of interactive technologies.

This workshop will serve as a forum for reflection and open dialogue on tensions and opportunities to integrate commoning and cooperative principles into HCI research and community engagement, as well as to foster and support a diverse and interdisciplinary community of researchers, commoners, and cooperative practitioners.