Designing for Local Economies of Personal Artifacts

Abstract

Many non-profit resource sharing organizations and collectives (e.g., libraries of things) and local peer-to-peer exchange initiatives leverage underutilized personal resources, such as household tools, to optimize their use. These local sharing initiatives and arrangements often suffer from challenges of continued participation, visibility of members’ interactions as well as interpersonal trust among the membership, which prevent their sustainable development. In prior work, we engaged in a field study of Pumpipumpe, a local resource sharing community in Switzerland to identify members’ needs and requirements to support sharing practices among neighbors. Following insights from this study, we conducted a generative participatory workshop with six community members and design and sustainability experts to approach these emergent challenges. We present the design artifacts that we have developed for the co-creation workshop as well as three design alternatives that our participants conceptualized to address issues of visibility of social interactions and trust among neighbors.