Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper contributes to the discourse on HCI and political economy, further developing theoretical concepts of strategies and tactics by drawing on the original work of French scholar Michel de Certeau. Strategies and tactics are developed and used as a lens to reflect and understand decisions made throughout an IT design process oriented toward infrastructuring social collaboration among people who are struggling financially.

Recently, HCI scholars have started questioning the relationship between computing and political economy, with both general analyses of such relationships, and specific design cases describing design interventions. This paper contributes to this stream of reflections, and argues that IT designers and HCI scholars can critically engage with the contemporary phase of capitalism by infrastructuring the emergence of new institutional forms of autonomous social collaboration through IT projects.