Participation is important to Human–Computer Interaction; yet, there are few empirical accounts of how it can be enacted in practice when working with at-risk communities under safety and precarity concerns. This paper offers an account of a six-year, community-led collaboration with an organization supporting individuals affected by forced marriage in Switzerland, centered on the design, development, and handover of a digital self-help tool. Rather than centering the artifact, we use its creation as an analytic lens to examine how design justice principles were enacted and negotiated through concrete decisions, boundaries, and compromises within a highly sensitive, care-centered context. Our account illustrates how justice-oriented participation can be sustained through rights-based and trust-negotiated forms of engagement, even when participation is necessarily uneven, selective, unsafe, or time-limited. This paper contributes process-level insights for HCI researchers and practitioners designing with at-risk communities, foregrounding shared decision-making, community ownership, and responsible handover within existing ecologies of care.

Design equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators’ perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.

Healthcare providers play a crucial role in developing care plans for patients at the end of their lives. As value elicitation becomes increasingly integrated into advance care planning, digital tools have been proposed to support providers. However, the development of these tools has primarily focused on facilitating communication of values from patients to providers. To address providers' specific needs and barriers, such as using values to create and manage medical care plans, we conducted an exploratory study capturing provider perspectives. Through interviews with 18 palliative care providers, we identified what they consider the typical value elicitation process, its associated challenges, and their visions for an ideal future process. To guide future research in determining priority areas for technology intervention, we synthesized our findings into a conceptual model that visualizes the tasks of providers in value elicitation. Comparing our model with previous models focused on patient and caregiver tasks, we found that provider perspectives introduce additional tasks in value elicitation that warrant attention: the creation, member-checking, and formal documentation of care plans by providers. Based on our findings, we argue that future work should focus on designing digital tools that support the provider-specific tasks of care plan creation and management to improve value elicitation.

Universities grow increasingly committed to equal access for individuals with disabilities, balancing the appearance of inclusion while upholding values of academic rigour. Within these universities, employees working in accessibility must mediate an unstable web of organizational and technological infrastructures. This study examines the government mandates, organizational structures, processes, and policies in a research university in Canada aimed at meeting the accessibility needs of its students. Our findings suggest that there is an interplay between informal and formal practices to navigate institutional systems. Technology serves as a mediator in the ''behind-the-scenes'' work that occurs at the intersection of infrastructures. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to better support accessibility work in universities. We suggest the use of seamful design to support accessibility work, as it aligns with the dynamic nature of disability and distributed networks of accessibility work. We recommend designers foster interdependence to support workers who navigate overlapping infrastructures and breakdowns at the seams.

Large language models (LLMs) are the new hot trend being rapidly integrated into products and services—often, in chatbots. LLM-powered chatbots are expected to respond to any number of topics, including topics central to gender identity . In light of rising anti-trans discourse, we examined how two popular LLMs responded to real-world English-language questions about trans identity taken from Quora. We employed reflexive analysis that centered our situated knowledges of the trans community. We found that LLMs return pro-trans responses, even when presented with highly transphobic user prompts. While we also found highly transphobic LLM responses, we found that anti-trans sentiment in LLMs was often subtle, requiring a deep positional understanding from diverse trans stakeholders to interpret. Based on these findings, we recommend diverging from current “value-neutral” approaches that validate transphobia by taking an “all sides” approach. We provide considerations for both the evaluation and design of LLMs that center positional expertise.

Care work has long been relegated to private households and small communities, however, with the entry of digital marketplaces, it is becoming part of public economic spheres. While care work has been generally devalued and understudied, it is a complex practice embedded in a network of economic transactions, social relations, material conditions, and socio-cultural norms. This paper explores the care giving networks among migrant house-cleaners guided by Tronto’s ‘care ethics’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care’. We interviewed 19 Latino house-cleaners in Toronto to understand their care practices and networks. Our analysis identifies gaps in our participants’ care networks. We create a new term, lateral care, to explicate the digital communities of care practice our participants formed. We conclude with implications for the future design of technologies for labor economies that attend to concerns of care.

This paper explores the interplay between identity, collective action, and digital marketplaces among Latino house-cleaners in Toronto. Domestic work, such as house-cleaning, has traditionally been devalued, gendered, and delegated to marginalised immigrant populations. The informal nature of house-cleaning work, also introduces precarity, vulnerabilities and potential avenues of exploitation. Drawing on 19 interviews with Latino house-cleaners, the paper underscores how identity shapes experiences and strategies in the labour markets. We find that Latino house-cleaners prefer to use asynchronous digital marketplaces, such as social media commerce groups and online classified advertisement websites, as the platforms provides flexibility and control over their labour outcomes. The paper further delves into how group identities online - such as being Latino and women - foster collective action and solidarity. The paper provides insights on how we can support the needs support the challenges and needs of immigrant domestic workers in technology-mediated labour markets.

Design toolkits that aim to to promote equity offer designers simplified approaches to creating more equitable technology. However, it is important to understand how equity is conceptualized in practice. As a curated collection of methods, toolkits signal how equity is imagined in design. In this paper, we perform a qualitative analysis of 17 design toolkits related to equity. We explore alternative design approaches that address inequity in design. We evaluate whether equity toolkits align with calls for changes to design practice, as well as Nancy Fraser’s dimensions of justice. Finally, we find that design toolkits focus on the ‘digital divide’ rather than redistributing world-building power, and thus continue to keep design power with professional designers. We also find that ‘design thinking’ continues to influence design toolkits. Furthermore, the simplicity of toolkits does not engage with the complexities that shape equity in practice. We conclude with suggestions to help researchers and designers rethink design toolkits.

The farmers' movement began in November 2020, when more than 300,000 protesters marched towards New Delhi in India in opposition to new agrarian acts introduced by the Indian central government. Organised by over 400 farmers' unions along with other organisations, for the next year, farmers and allied protesters set up bases around New Delhi and sustained the movement leading to its eventual success. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with participants from the movement and explored the social organisation, the underlying technical infrastructures, and how collective action was organised. We outline how the social media ecosystem enabled hybrid forms of organisational structures and facilitated coalition-building between diverse groups. Further, the movement created and disseminated alternative media that opposed mainstream media narratives and facilitated community-building. We discuss how designed technologies and spaces can support social movements in the face of powerful antagonistic actors.