Community wealth building through digital tools for collaborative funding

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) hold promise for advancing economic justice, while their design practices often replicate extractive logics. This research responds to this tension by exploring how HCI can support Community wealth building (CWB) and Solidarity economy (SE) through radical participatory design (RPD). Grounded in feminist economics and feminist HCI, the study asks: How can digital infrastructure be co-designed with grassroots communities to address extreme economic inequality; and how can conventional design methods be subverted to reflect co-operative values?

The research engages two stages of inquiry to address these questions. First, it critically examines three platforms (Culture Stake, Circles UBI and Open Collective), revealing how their emancipatory aims can be undermined by the re-inscription of structural inequalities, demonstrating that emerging technologies alone are insufficient for equitable outcomes. Second, it develops and tests two novel participatory methods through empirical engagements with London-based co-operatives and a community land trust: 1) Solidarity mapping which subverts example mapping to prioritise mutual aid and collective agency over efficiency and productivity; and 2) Pick-a-Pebble method, which subverts the accelerated logic of design sprints by embedding care, reflection and a shared pacing termed ‘community time’.

Employing qualitative methods, including expert interviews, focus groups, co-design workshops and thematic analysis, the research contributes both conceptual insights and practical approaches. Methodologically, it adopts a reflexive, emergent stance, treating unpredictability as a generative condition for feminist inquiry. By embedding co-operative principles into both process and output, the study reframes design as a foundational practice for building solidarity-driven digital infrastructures and interactive systems. Finally, this work offers a direction of thinking for ‘designing otherwise’, proposing actionable pathways for HCI to move beyond critique and towards community-led practices that redistribute power, challenge extractive logics in favour of economic justice.