HCC: Small: Design Strategies to Facilitate Implicit Care in Online Communities

Online communities are increasingly important for social interaction and social support. However, the many but subtle ways community members provide care and support to one another are often unnoticed and poorly supported by the design of existing online community software platforms. This project's goal is to enhance the ability of online communities to provide implicit care, such as subtle acts of inclusion and support, by studying these interactions on common online community platforms.

By identifying and documenting implicit care practices, designing interventions to facilitate them, and developing strategies for platform designers to consider implicit care, the project seeks to improve the social health and cohesion of online communities. The findings will benefit society by promoting healthier and more supportive online interactions, contributing to national well-being, as well as directly benefiting students and communities involved in the research.

Through this project, the project team will identify, document, and analyze implicit care practices in online communities through digital ethnography, diary studies, interviews, and co-design workshops. Using the insights from those studies, the team will design, deploy, and iterate lightweight interventions, such as community bots and browser add-ons, to facilitate these practices.

The research team will also develop and refine a framework of critical theoretical lenses and design strategies to support implicit care, culminating in a publicly available repository of findings and tools. By focusing on parent groups and gaming communities on platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, the research team aims to map the technical characteristics that enable or hinder implicit care and to provide actionable insights for researchers, designers, and community managers to foster supportive online environments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.