The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action.

The result is rising distress, overwhelm, and disengagement— particularly among young people who encounter global suffering through platforms designed for attention capture rather than constructive response.

This workshop examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges. Drawing on Tronto’s care ethics framework and research in moral psychology and platform studies, we ask why caring at scale is difficult and how social media can both exacerbate and potentially mitigate this difficulty.

Tronto’s framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase.

We invite researchers and designers to identify platform designs that deplete or support the capacity to care, and to develop design directions for sustainable care: engagement that people can maintain over time without burning out.

• JaeWon Kim — University of Washington Information School
• Lindsay Popowski — Stanford HCI
• Louisa Conwill — University of Notre Dame
• Elizabeth "Lizzie" Li — Northwestern University
• Meryl Ye — Carnegie Mellon University
• Jiaying "Lizzy" Liu — University of Texas at Austin
• Jose A. Guridi — Cornell University
• Theia Henderson — MIT CSAIL
• Bingxu Han — Stanford University
• Dennis Wang — National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
• Angel Hwang — University of Southern California
• Susan Wyche — Michigan State University
• Yasmine Kotturi — UMBC
• Gillian Hayes — University of California, Irvine
• Angela D. R. Smith — University of Texas at Austin

We invite researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in social technologies, care, wellbeing, and societal challenges to participate in this workshop.

Participants will engage in collaborative discussions about how social media and platform design shape people's capacity to sustain engagement with difficult societal issues over time.

Application Deadline: August 3rd, 2026

Application Form: https://forms.gle/gNJ5mevcjAbemMbaA