Wong, Ngoi Ying Priscilla; (2025) Design of Online Collective Action Spaces for Climate Activists: An Identity-Centred Approach. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Addressing climate change is a major challenge of this century, mobilising millions of advocates globally. However, despite the widespread use of online platforms for climate activism, there is still an underrepresentation of marginalised people of colour (POC) in the climate community. This thesis aims to address this gap by exploring POC’s perspectives and barriers to participation and suggesting how the design of online platforms can support and encourage their engagement. To achieve this, four mixed-methods studies were conducted. Guided by a post-structuralist approach, I adopted multiple identity-centred theories tailored to each study. This approach allowed me to synthesise and connect empirical findings across the thesis, fostering a nuanced and context-specific understanding of POC’s identities and informing the design of technology that supports their needs. First, semi-structured interviews (n=12) explored challenges faced by POC in online and offline climate communities including those related to racial identity. Our findings underscore the need for identity-centred approaches in the design of online spaces. Building upon these findings, I conducted three studies including a survey (n=264) to understand the utilisation of online platforms and anonymisation features by individuals of diverse racial identities, an experimental study (n=115) to investigate the impact of revealing racial information on group engagement; and finally, a co-design study evaluating a framework (n=9) rooted in our findings and identity-centred theories for practitioners to better design inclusive online environments for POC in climate activism. This thesis offers three key contributions. Firstly, it made a methodological contribution to the HCI community by adopting an identity-centred, post structuralist approach in the framing of this thesis, embracing diverse, contextspecific, pluralistic truths based on POC’s identity, culture and values instead of one singular reality. This enriched our understanding of POC’s psychological and social needs related to their own lived experiences when participating in collective climate actions. Second, following this approach, this research designed specific study materials, tools and artefacts and reimagined design recommendations including the Equitable Design Framework for POC’s Collective Climate Actions to deepen our understanding of dynamic systemic factors such as trauma and intersectional identities. Not only does this further enhance future study approaches of HCI research to explore identity-centred issues of marginalised individuals, but also provides design recommendations for a wide range of stakeholders outside of academia including developers, designers, online moderators and organisers of climate organisations to adopt. Lastly, it contributes theoretically to the literature of Psychology and Environmental Psychology by highlighting the importance of social-identity-related factors in collective climate actions, shifting from traditional beliefs that climate activism is an opinion-based movement.

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