Züri teilt: Facilitating Resource Sharing Practices in Neighborhoods

Abstract

In the non-profit sharing economy context, an increasing number of resource sharing collectives and organizations (e.g., libraries of things) and peer-to-peer grassroots sharing initiatives leverage underutilized household resources (e.g., tools) to optimize their shared use for the benefit of their local communities. However, a number of social-technical challenges prevent the endurance and growth of such initiatives. Prior research highlighted the specific difficulties related to poor visibility of members’ activities and often high social barriers that hinder interactions among neighbors and strangers. In our prior work, stemming from our continuous engagement with one local sharing community in Switzerland over several years, through fieldwork, interviews, and co-creation studies, we elicited a set of design opportunities to address the emergent community’s challenges. Based on these design considerations, we developed Züri teilt, a mobile application to facilitate resource sharing practices among neighbors aligning with the slow, temporal, and gradual nature of their relationships.