Remote and hybrid work arrangements enabled New Yorkers to participate in community environmental action by giving them both the time and the motivation to do so, a new study from NYU finds.
Published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction and presented at the 2025 Aarhus Conference on Critical Computing , the study draws on five years of ethnographic research at a volunteer-run composting and gardening site in Sunnyside, Queens.
It found that flexible schedules and work-from-home routines made it possible for independent and creative workers to engage in hands-on environmental labor during the workday. Many reported being driven not only by availability but by a desire to counter the isolation and screen fatigue associated with remote professional life.
Conducted by Margaret Jack , Industry Assistant Professor in NYU Tandon School of Engineering's Department of Technology, Culture, and Society , the research focuses on a site known as 45th St Greenspace, established in 2020 on a formerly vacant lot.
Volunteers — many of whom were freelance or hybrid workers in fields like design, academia, or media — organized composting operations, garden plantings, public events, and infrastructure improvements. Most lived nearby and integrated the garden into their daily or weekly routines.
"Working from home didn't just change where people did their jobs, it changed how they lived in their neighborhoods," said Jack. "We found that flexible schedules and a need for offline connection drew people into environmental projects, where they could turn screen time into green time."
The study offers new insight into how technology-mediated work environments shape civic participation and local infrastructure. It contributes to human-centered engineering research by examining how digital platforms like Slack, Zoom, and Signal also alter grassroots environmental systems and collective organizing.
Participants coordinated their work using these platforms, and the project's governance structure reflected common patterns in digitally enabled work: horizontal decision-making, collaborative workflows, and distributed leadership.
Jack frames the garden itself as a socio-technical system, one whose function and sustainability depended not just on physical tools like compost bins and raised beds, but also on the digital infrastructure and cultural norms imported from participants' professional lives.
The project reflects how technologies designed for individual productivity are being adapted for civic and ecological collaboration, raising design questions relevant to the development of future civic technologies.
While the project was open to the public and built on values of inclusion and mutual aid, Jack found that sustained participation was shaped by access to time, stability, and professional autonomy. Parents of young children, people with rigid or physically demanding jobs, and those unfamiliar with digital communication tools were often less able to remain actively involved.
Cultural expectations around communication and conflict resolution also revealed differences within the group. Though mediation structures were developed, they often relied on middle-class professional norms, which did not resonate equally across cultural or linguistic backgrounds.
The research employed a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic methods. Jack, a local resident and volunteer at the garden, conducted participant observation over five years, maintained field notes and reflective journals, and led interviews and a survey with core volunteers.
The project also included contributions from community collaborators and comparative fieldwork in other New York gardens. These methods, often used in the design and evaluation of socio-technical systems, allow engineering researchers to understand not only how tools function, but how they shape behavior, governance, and access.
Though 45th St Greenspace is now preparing to close due to private development, Jack sees the project as emblematic of a wider shift in urban civic engagement. As hybrid and independent work becomes more common, she argues, it reshapes how people interact with both digital platforms and the physical city, bringing new possibilities for environmental infrastructure, but also new forms of exclusion.
