Sociology

Business

Knowledge management

Politics

Human–computer interaction

Political science

Psychology

Process management

Computer science

Capitalism

CoDesign

This special issue presents contributions interrogating how co-design is positioning itself in the age of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016). It brings together theoretical reflections on the position of co-design and empirical cases of co-design that can shed better light on these dynamics, with an accent on sharing and caring. A workshop co-located with the Communities and Technologies 2017 conference organised by the editors of this special issue constituted the starting point. The workshop, entitled ‘Collaborative Economies – From Sharing to Caring’ (Avram et al. 2017) was an initiative of the ‘Sharing and Caring’COST action and invited wide participation around the themes of digital social innovation, design for change, environmental sustainability and ecological concerns, as well as platform cooperativism. To follow up, the workshop ‘Collaborative Technologies on Strike’, 1 a one day of collaboration between scholars, union members, and activists to discuss the possibilities for a technology design, development, and appropriation strategically aligned with the goals of industrial action, took place in Genk, Belgium, co-located with the Participatory Design Conference 2018. The Special Interest Group on ‘Cooperativism and Human-Computer Interaction’(Fedosov et al. 2019), another event in this series, had its inaugural meeting at the CHI 2019 conference. Such events have been revealing the limits of both practical and theoretical knowledge in these areas and, certainly, the gap in literature linking them. The call for papers for this special issue was launched in September 2017 and resulted in 30 abstract submissions involving approximately 70 authors. Full paper submissions were invited for 19 of these. In May 2018, we received 12 submissions; six of these papers were accepted for this special issue. The accepted papers cover a diverse range of topics – from data hacking, digital currency and learning, to more general topics such as theorising care, discussing the commons in the context of platforms, and creating a common ground for social welfare practices in Europe.

Repositioning CoDesign in the age of platform capitalism: from sharing to caring