Conference Agenda

Design research in social computing has used the concept of care to describe how technologies help or hinder interpersonal support online. Yet opportunities remain to explore how the subtle, everyday forms of care that have long sustained communities can inform social technology design. Addressing this, we present a collection of design patterns that translate culturally specific, everyday social practices like passeggiata (Italian social stroll) and sobremesa (Spanish post-meal lingering) into design prompts for digital platforms. Our collection has five pattern families: Shared Habits and Routines, Atmospheric Qualities, Collective Identities, Facilitation Roles, and Boundary Practices. The patterns map these families to implicit care practices identified through digital ethnographies of Reddit, Discord, and Facebook communities, illustrating how platforms can support, without scripting, everyday forms of care. The resulting collection functions as both an analytic and generative tool, foregrounding how everyday care is enacted through rhythm, atmosphere, and maintenance in online community life.

This paper explores how the ethics of care can be applied to circular product design. Although the concept of care is compatible with circular design, individualistic models of care place excessive focus on single actors, such as designers, while approaches of shared or collective care risk the diffusion of responsibility, making it unclear who should act in order for certain needs to be met. These approaches fail to adequately address three interrelated problems: moral distance, influence (or lack thereof), and the diffusion of responsibility. Consequently, this paper introduces the concept of distributed care, an approach that focuses on assigning care responsibilities to stakeholders in a value chain according to their competence and sphere of influence. Ultimately, this paper argues that achieving a truly sustainable and ethical circular economy requires a (fair) distribution of care among all stakeholders in a value chain.

Contemporary memorial exhibitions presume emotional intensity produces durable memory, employing affective saturation strategies that neuroscientific research reveals as counterproductive. Emotional arousal consolidates central affective impressions whilst compromising contextual understanding: visitors retain visceral sensations but lose historical processes. This paper develops a theoretical framework integrating Assmann's cultural memory theory, neuroscience of memory consolidation, and care ethics to inform commemorative exhibition design. A four-modality taxonomy, individual, collective, spatial, and sensory, translates psychological memory categories into operationally distinct design approaches. Digital mediation constitutes a transversal narrative apparatus serving memory transmission across all four modalities, functioning as infrastructural support. Design parameters specify spatial configurations, lighting, materiality, and temporal organisation calibrated to biological constraints. Design care challenges dominant memorial practice, proposing that respecting cognitive limits facilitates memorial depth. Three mechanisms, modulation, pacing, and recovery, operationalise care principles, repositioning visitors as active meaning-makers whose memorial formation requires conditions that facilitate rather than overwhelm processing capacity.

Emerging grief technologies promise to preserve the dead through data, yet often neglect the relational, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of memory and identity. This paper proposes a care-centred framework for digital legacy design, grounded in the speculative concept of A Living Will, which uses augmented reality to enable co-created posthumous memories between the living and the deceased. Through autoethnography, participatory workshops, and theoretical analysis, the study critically examines how care ethics and co-authorship can transform digital legacy from an act of preservation to one of participation. By treating identity as distributed and legacy as relational, we reframe grief technology as a site of relational responsibility rather than as a form of simulation by cultivating ongoing, situated relationships with the dead. The contribution positions care not as sentiment but as method, showing how speculative design can enact care through ambiguity, consent, and embodied remembering.

Urban crises and power inequalities intensify processes of urbanization that reinforce exclusion, segregation, and displacement. Within urban design, care has recently been discussed as an ethical and political framework for addressing these dynamics. However, little attention has been paid to how care-ethical principles can be translated into concrete urban design practices. This paper responds to this gap by developing four caring practices for urban design. Using dialogical inquiry through conversation as a method, the research brings together feminist care ethics with situated, practice-based knowledge from the urban design project Forno Vagabondo – a mobile social oven traveling through a valley in the Italian Alps. Through this process, four interrelated approaches are developed: context sensitivity, common maintenance, tangible interdependence, and transformative solidarity. Together, these practices illustrate how care can materialize in urban design and open possibilities for more relational and emancipatory urban futures.

The smart city paradigm operates on data representation, meaning that communities not included in official datasets are not represented and therefore do not exist politically. This condition of systemic exclusion demands an ethical design intervention, mixing cartography, visual communication and graphic design. Our paper presents a dual methodological approach that constitutes a cartography of care. This methodological framework visualises undocumented functional dynamics, providing a data-driven basis for urban planning that reflects the actual, lived usage of the city. First, we introduce ethnographic projection, a participatory design methodology that creates protected representation within existing GIS systems. Second, we present chorematic visualisation, a cartographic technique for abstraction that converts quantitative data into primary geometrical structures. This visualisation serves as an analytical stage that explains excluded phenomena such as shadow labour routes and community care networks, which technological mapping ignores. This process is showcased through undocumented migrant workers in Tel Aviv.