Supporting the design of sharing economy services: Learning from technology-mediated sharing practices of both digital and physical artifacts

Abstract

Sharing personal digital information online has been a common activity for many years. However, the recent rise of sharing economy services has since expanded the set of “things” one can share. How does the sharing of such physical artifacts differ from “traditional” sharing practices of photos and status updates? This paper attempts to consolidate the existing body of work on both sharing personal digital content (e.g., social networking) and personal physical artifacts (e.g., apartment, car sharing), and attempts to identify both commonalities and differences between them. We summarize existing research on the diversity of shared content, users' motivations to share, audience management, privacy & trust issues, and user experience requirements. We also conduct 16 semi-structured interviews with both design practitioners and sharing economy domain experts to formulate a set of design implications for devising novel sharing economy services.