Collaborative agency and sensitive design for social resilience

The chapter elaborates on values, concepts, and processes that lead to sensitive design of online and offline modes of collaborative action to tackle inequalities in the incorporation of existing resilient competencies of people involved in searching for such solutions embedded in the existing geopolitical and microsocial contexts. After introducing the theoretical foundation of the term social resilience, anchored in social sciences, we expound two key elements of it, collaborative action and sensitive designing, through the use of diverse analytical descriptions of real-life situations rooted in European societies. Whether maintaining cybersecurity, decorating a Christmas tree in an elementary school classroom, purchasing public transport tickets in busy metropolitan transportation hubs, getting to a virtual classroom, or using online chat and digital management tools, we consider the diversity of actors, backgrounds, and technologies to formulate five principles of supporting social resilience: the group nature of social resilience, collaborative action as a common respectful process of dealing with a task, focus on collaborative agency, sensitive design of technological support for collaboration, and the coexistence of human and technological actions.