As civic data typically involves multiple stakeholders and institutions, data work often happens across seamful spaces. We use seams as an analytical lens to examine data production in a civic data project mapping extreme heat islands to promote environmental and climate justice. Our analysis calls attention to the work of aligning multiple infrastructures as well as the temporal and political qualities of seamful arrangements. Throughout our participation in planning and executing this civic data project, our attention was consistently called to the seams during moments of breakdown. Examining the conditions of these misalignments, we argue that seams decay as underlying infrastructures shift over time through product development, personnel turnover, and institutional change. Further analyzing the responses and maintenance work needed to sustain or re-create alignment reveals how power dynamics are reinforced or asserted at the seams. Civic design interventions must attend to these temporal and political aspects of seamful spaces when working in collaboration with other city stakeholders.

Bird collisions with man-made structures pose a significant threat to bird populations. In the U.S. South, a small group of dedicated volunteers track these deaths with hopes of advocating for local policy requiring the use of bird-safe building materials. In addition to recording observations in a mobile application, volunteers log their efforts and collect the bodies of birds they find to add to university specimen collections. We offer a detailed empirical account of the work done by volunteers to produce (1) a digital record of local bird strikes (2) a log of volunteer monitoring efforts and (3) a collection of bird specimens. Unpacking the multiple forms of data produced by volunteer efforts, we examine how Safe Flight produced data oriented towards advocacy work. We end by discussing implications for data activism, highlighting the link between materiality and charismatic data, and proposing next steps for action citizen science.

Workplaces of all kinds continue to be transformed by computing. One example of these transformations is in public transportation, where transit agencies are experimenting with on-demand transit to address long-standing challenges in delivering first- and last-mile service. On-demand transit shares some features with ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft: riders request service when and where they are. Although rideshare systems have provided a set of interaction idioms and familiar interfaces upon which to model on-demand systems, work settings and labor conditions are very different. These differences matter and the way “disruptive” systems impact the work environment of public transit operators remains under examined. We report on interviews with transit operators from a 6-month pilot program. Our findings illustrate how the shift in in-vehicle technologies and service expectations affected work processes, well-being, and safety and we offer insight into the consequences of digital labor in the context of on-demand transit.

Collisions with man-made structures such as buildings, vehicles, and energy infrastructure are a significant threat to bird populations. Throughout the U.S., groups of volunteers monitor bird-building collisions to better understand the environmental impact of collisions and to advocate for the use of bird-safe building materials. The first author participated in monitoring bird-building collisions in Atlanta during the spring and fall migration seasons of 2023. This pictorial is a reflection on the experience of producing this data based on interviews with volunteers and the experiences and photographs of the first author. We contribute a rich account of the experiential elements of data production and a discussion of more-than-human entanglements in urban spaces.

Platforms like Nextdoor and Citizen can increase users’ fear of crime by broadcasting frequent, local, and personalized information about potential safety risks. These platforms can contribute to a dysfunctional fear of crime, which undermines a person’s quality of life and mental health without actually making them feel safer. In this work, we conducted a mixed-methods study to understand the potential for design to foster a functional fear of crime, which motivates precaution without negatively impacting quality of life. We first interview individuals with a dysfunctional fear of crime and then validate interview results with a survey. Through this process, we identified five strategies for designers to support users in developing a more functional fear of crime. These strategies surface overarching theoretical and design implications for designers and researchers of safety platform with the ultimate goal of supporting safety, quality of life, and mental health for users of these platforms.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of the toolkit Bitacora, addressed to practitioners working in non-profit organizations interested in integrating Twitter data into their work. The toolkit responds to the call to maintain the locality of data by promoting a qualitative and contextualized approach to analyzing Twitter data. We assessed the toolkit’s effectiveness in guiding practitioners to search, collect, and be critical when analyzing data from Twitter. We evaluated the toolkit with ten practitioners from three non-profit organizations of different aims and sizes in Mexico. The assessment surfaced tensions between the assumptions embedded in the toolkit’s design and practitioners’ expectations, needs, and backgrounds. We show that practitioners navigated these tensions in some cases by developing strategies and, in others, questioning the appropriateness of using Twitter data to inform their work. We conclude with recommendations for researchers who developed tools for non-profit organizations to inform humanitarian action.

Data work is often completed by crowdworkers, who are routinely dehumanized, disempowered, and sidelined. We turn to citizen science to reimagine data work, highlighting collaborative relationships between citizen science project managers and volunteers. Though citizen science and traditional crowd work entail similar forms of data work, such as classifying or transcribing large data sets, citizen science relies on volunteer contributions rather than paid data work. We detail the work citizen science project managers did to shape volunteer experiences: aligning science goals, minimizing barriers to participation, engaging communities, communicating with volunteers, providing training and education, rewarding contributions, and reflecting on volunteer work. These management strategies created opportunities for meaningful work by cultivating intrinsic motivation and fostering collaborative work relationships but ultimately limited participation to specific data-related tasks. We recommend management tactics and task design strategies for creating meaningful work for "invisible collar" workers, an understudied class of labor in CSCW.

As data plays an increasing role in civic decision making, diverse organizations are facing pressure to engage in data work. The HCI community has explored both the potential of and challenges to integrating robust data practices in mission-driven organizations. At each step – from collection, to storage, to analysis, to maintenance – these organizations need to develop tools and practices that balance internal operational needs and external community priorities. This work reports on an 11 month-long collaboration with a mission-driven hybrid organization that has designed tools and procedures for collecting data that enact an ethic of care. This caring data practice is characterized by defining success through relationships, attending to the social and cultural community context, and protecting vulnerable populations through non-collection. We share the organization’s practices, analyze how they support the organization in providing care, and offer recommendations for building caring data systems.

This paper examines the practices involved in mobilizing social media data from their site of production to the institutional context of non-profit organizations. We report on nine months of fieldwork with a transnational and intergovernmental organization using social media data to understand the role of grassroots initiatives in Mexico, in the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show how different stakeholders negotiate the definition of problems to be addressed with social media data, the collective creation of ground-truth, and the limitations involved in the process of extracting value from data. The meanings of social media data are not defined in advance; instead, they are contingent on the practices and needs of the organization that seeks to extract insights from the analysis. We conclude with a list of reflections and questions for researchers who mediate in the mobilization of social media data into non-profit organizations to inform humanitarian action.

In this study, we examined the successes and challenges in online framing activities specific to place-based activism resisting urban redevelopment and gentrification. We conducted a qualitative analysis of online discourse on Twitter around the redevelopment of an old manufacturing district in Seoul, South Korea, and investigated how the place-based nature of the contested situation complicated the process of public mobilization. We found that the collective meaning-making based on individuals' existing relationships to a contested place led the citizens who were neither the tenants nor property owners in the area to find the struggle relevant to their lives and to establish their agency in an effort to influence redevelopment policy. We argue that the capacity of online discourse that alters the social meaning of place and its ownership opens up an opportunity for technology to better support grassroots efforts to improve social justice in urban development and policy-making processes. Yet, the disputes we found from the online discussions revealed some limitations of online discourse in place-based activism, which led us to suggest research agendas for the CSCW community to address the limitations.

With rapid advances in computing, we are beginning to see the expansion of technology into domains far afield from traditional office settings historically at the center of CSCW research. Manufacturing is one industry undergoing a new phase of digital transformation. Shop-floor workers are being equipped with tools to deliver efficiency and support data-driven decision making. To understand how these kinds of technologies are affecting the nature of work, we conducted a 15-month qualitative study of the digitalization of the shipping and receiving department at a small manufacturer located in the Southeastern United States. Our findings provide an in-depth understanding of how the norms and values of factory floor workers shape their perception and adoption of computing services designed to augment their work. We highlight how emerging technologies are creating a new class of hybrid workers and point to the social and human elements that need to be considered to preserve meaningful work for blue-collar professionals.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States demanded police reform and legislative action. Data-driven policing is just one technological intervention designed with the hope to tackle police brutality. However, these design interventions are often rooted in the continued racial profiling of poor and socially marginalized communities. Designers and researchers need a Healing Justice framework to circumvent this harm. Healing Justice addresses generational trauma and violence in marginalized communities and is not just a framework for policing but can address maternal mortality rates, COVID-19, medical malpractice, and other trauma issues. In this paper, we apply a Healing Justice framework to co-design activities focused on police brutality. We bridge Healing Justice and design by using an Afrofuturist Feminism framework, arguing that Healing Justice and Afrofuturist feminism frameworks lead to collective, grassroots, and pragmatic designs.

In this paper, we describe and analyze the data practices of an activist non-profit, the Housing Justice League. We focus on their Tenant Power Hotline, a community outreach tool for tenants facing eviction and seeking organizing support. This research contributes to existing scholarship that examines data practices and the use of information and communication technologies in non-profit and grassroots organizations. To this existing scholarship, we share the structure of a counter-institution: an organization that strives to operate outside the non-profit industrial complex. We then interpret the work of Housing Justice League through the lens of care, identifying homebrewed databases and data fragmentations as negotiations between care and efficiency. We argue that care is enacted through the assemblage of the technical systems, and present tinkering as an alternative approach to developing data practices.?

Public services increasingly presume a new and more active role for individuals to play in datafied society. While design efforts increasingly attempt to include stakeholders, such attempts are often limited to professional perspectives. Little is known about how individuals who are subject to these solutions experience the increasing use of data about them. One example of public services is job placement. Taking design fiction as our approach, we invited individuals enrolled in job placement (n=20) to reflect on the ‘work of the unemployed’, a fictive scenario where individuals make themselves eligible for support through sharing data. The fiction addresses power dynamics. The study shows how approaches, such as design fiction, are effective at including marginalized communities through changing the conditions for design. Showcasing the fictional outlook, and how the ‘design experience’ can be disempowering if not qualified through a deeper critique, the paper contributes to agendas on design justice.

As the role technology plays in relationships between people and their governments grows, developing a better understanding of how trust can inform designing civic technology with trust is urgent work for human computer-interaction researchers. This paper reports our efforts to design with trust through a two-year design-ethnography with the City of Atlanta Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. We developed a sociotechnical system—Code Enforcer—to help this office guide immigrant residents through successfully engaging the city's code enforcement process. To inform the design process, we adapted our framework of trust-as-distance. While the framework was instrumental for integrating issues of trust throughout our design process, it also introduced tensions between how and by whom trust was enacted and interpreted. By reflecting on these tensions, we tease out the political and moral elements of designing with trust vital for HCI to navigate moving forward.

Manufacturing workplaces are becoming sites of intense change as technologies like IoT and AR/VR are beginning to make deep inroads into how complex products are engi-neered and assembled. These categories of technologies are becoming prominent in manufacturing because they offer potential solutions to the problems of unskilled labor and workforce shortages. Technology has the potential to shift manufacturing in both large and small ways, to better un-derstand how a manufacturing organization might appropri-ate VR, we ran a study with a global aviation manufacturer headquartered the United States. To document the changing nature of work via this class of technologies we conducted a VR study which facilitated access to participant observation and interviews (n=21). Our findings provide initial insights into the organizational impact of VR on human perfor-mance augmentation and skill acquisition revealing the larger infrastructural challenges facing the adoption of con-sumer grade smart technologies in industrial workplace settings.

Social media platforms offer a rich repository of crowdsourced information that has the potential to monitor human rights violations. The challenge is to quantify, interpret, and situate such unstructured data streams in the broader context, which remains under-investigated in existing CSCW research. Addressing these challenges demands computational solutions to extract large volumes of data in conjunction with human intervention to transition the data streams into the offline context to render them usable and actionable. Following an iterative human-in-the-loop computational approach, we explore whether citizen reports of abductions concentrated on Facebook groups can be useful to complete official records on the ongoing crisis of disappearances in Mexico. We conceptualize three key practices of the process of transitioning the data from online to offline, followed by seven qualitative characteristics of the data streams that contribute to each stage of the process. Our research contributes with an initial understanding of the challenges and opportunities of migrating the local knowledge from online communities to be used as evidence by organizations seeking to address institutional failures.

There is growing interest in Digital Civics regarding how trust can inform the design of technology in the civic space. Previous work has identified several key elements of trust in digital civics to consider in design such as the connection between trust and distance, trust as sociotechnical, trust as process and trust design affordances. However, these elements have not yet been applied to design. We address this gap by engaging these elements in ongoing design research within Atlanta's Department of Immigrant Affairs. Our research inquiry with the department centered on developing a design intervention to improve the department's community engagement work. We developed a design intervention with the department through co-design which was then assessed and advanced using the elements of trust. By reflecting on this design process informed through the elements, we unify the elements of trust in digital civics towards a design framework.

The impact of computing devices on the nature of work has been a long-standing topic of inquiry. Removing the boundaries of traditional corporate organizations, mobile IoT has enabled a technology driven future, taking trans-formative technology off the desk and placing it in the field. The exponential increase in mobility and reduction in cost have expanded accessibility of computing technologies to whole new categories of work including emergency re-sponse. As new kinds of workplaces adopt and adapt to computing, we want to better understand how these tech-nologies impact the organization and change the types of work people do. In order to answer those questions, we present a qualitative investigation examining the implemen-tation of a wearable device into two fire departments in the Southeastern United States. Our analysis demonstrates how the particulars of these kinds of workplaces and organiza-tions will shape how we design new digital technologies for the next generation workforce.

Smart home technologies are beginning to become more widespread and common, even as their deployment and implementation remain complex and spread across different competing commercial ecosystems. Looking beyond the middle-class, single-family home often at the center of the smart home narrative, we report on a series of participatory design workshops held with residents and building managers to better understand the role of smart home technologies in the context of public housing in the U.S. The design workshops enabled us to gather insight into the specific challenges and opportunities of deploying smart home technologies in a setting where issues of privacy, data collection and ownership, and autonomy collide with diverse living arrangements, where income, age, and the consequences of monitoring and data aggregation setup an expanding collection of design implications in the ecosystems of smart home technologies.

Cities are increasingly integrating sensing and information and communication technologies to improve municipal services, civic engagement, and quality of life for residents. Although these civic technologies have the potential to affect economic, social, and environmental factors, there has been less focus on residents of lower income communities' involvement in civic technology design. Based on two public forums held in underserved communities, we describe residents' perceptions of civic technologies in their communities and challenges that limit the technologies' viability. We found that residents viewed civic technology as a tool that should strengthen existing community assets by providing an avenue to connect assets and build upon them. We describe how an asset-based approach can move us toward designing civic technology that develops stronger relationships among community-led initiatives, and between the community and local government--- rather than a data-driven approach to civic tech that focuses on transactions between residents and city services.

This study examines caseworkers' and citizens' interactions when assembling resource development applications for citizens with serious health and personal issues. As with other types of welfare schemes, the application serves as a mechanism of both support and control. From our study, we illustrate how an increased reliance on data is transforming the citizen-caseworker interaction in social welfare. We characterize this transformation as 'dataRication': a phenomenon where the increased reliance on data for decision-support across contexts of data production makes it challenging for individual citizens to contest or correct data-born accounts of their situation. Our contribution is two-fold: Rirst, we empirically characterize the citizen-caseworker interaction in the application process. Second, we discuss how citizens' private resourcing complements the formal application process and provides them with strategies to give authority to their case and exercise personal autonomy. The private resourcing practices we observed show how integrating supplementary accounts from citizens into the systems that caseworkers rely on could make citizens' experiences and social context legible. This in turn has policy and technology design implications as public services increasingly introduce data-driven modes of case management.

Digital civics research seeks to understand how technology can create new forms of relationships and services between public officials and citizens in governance. To accomplish this, design in digital civics emphasizes the importance of relationships based on dialogue, empowerment, and participation; all of which are contingent upon the existence of trust. Currently, however, these relationships are most often characterized by entrenched distrust which problematizes opportunities for dialogue and participation. In this paper, we explore how design might support trust in the relational aims of digital civics. To do so, we led 13 public officials in a large US city through a design-based inquiry centered around the role of trust in their various efforts to engage communities. In our findings, we discuss four strategies for supporting trust in digital civics.

Trust is a vital component of citizen participation-whether citizens decide to engage in opportunities for participation in local government can hinge entirely on the existence of trust between citizens and public officials. Understanding the role of trust in this space is vital for HCI and the growing area of Digital Civics which works to improve or create new modes of citizen participation. Currently, however, trust is understudied from the perspectives of public officials. This gap creates a critical blind spot as technical interventions may be mismatched to the ways trust is put into action by public officials working to support citizen participation. We begin to address this gap by presenting a broad qualitative study of how public officials in a large US city operationalize trust in citizen participation. We found trust is enacted through ongoing practices that man-age distance in relationships between public officials and city residents.

In this paper, we work to inform the growing space of Digital Civics with a qualitative study of community engagement practices across the breadth of municipal departments and agencies in a large US city. We conducted 34 inter-views across 15 different departments, including elected and professional city employees to understand how different domains within local government define and practice the work of engaging residents. Our interviews focused on how respondents conceptualized community engagement, how it fit into the other forms of work, and what kinds of outcomes they sought when they did 'engagement.' By reporting on this broad qualitative account of the many forms the work of community engagement takes in local government, we are contributing to an expansive view of digital civics that looks beyond the transactions of service delivery or the privileged moments of democratic ritual, to consider the wider terrain of mundane, daily challenges when trying to bridge between municipal government and city residents.

We examine the local data practices of citizens in Mexico who use Facebook sites as a platform to report crimes and share safety-related information. We conducted 14 interviews with a variety of participants who collaborate as administrators and contributors of these online communities. The communities we examined have two central components: the citizens who crowd-source data about instances of crime in different neighborhoods in and around Mexico City, and the administrators of the Facebook sites who use the crowd-sourced data to intervene and collaborate with other stakeholders. From our interviews, we identify the community, data, and action practices used by group administrators to collect, curate, and publish information about public safety that would otherwise go unreported. The combination of these practices improves the reputation of the groups on Facebook, increases trust, and encourages sustained participation from citizens. These practices also legitimize data gathered by group members as an important grassroots tool for responding to issues of public safety that would otherwise not be reported or acted upon. Our findings contribute a growing body of work that aims to understand how social media enable political action in contexts where people are not being served by existing institutions.

This paper examines the strategies of cycling advocates when deploying digital tools in their advocacy work as they support and create better cycling infrastructure and policies. Over the course of two years, we interviewed and conducted design-based fieldwork in two large U.S. cities with individuals and advocacy organizations, learning about the goals, motivations, and constraints that inform their work in their respective urban homes. Our design-based investigation and fieldwork advance a deeper, situated understanding of the role that computing technology plays when engaging across multiple sites of advocacy work. From this, we add detail to the connections across resources, identities, and issues and continue to advance the emerging area of digital civics, which seeks to design tools that support relational civic interactions across multiple categories of civic actors.

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as a research area with a comprehensive approach to designing for civic encounters where community engagement is a primary concern for designing systems and processes that support broad civic interaction. In short, over the past year, we worked with municipal officials, service providers, and city residents to design a community engagement playbook detailing best practices for city-scale engagement. The playbook, as well as the collaborative process that produced it, provides a roadmap for thinking through the kinds of systems that might populate the design space of city-scale digital civics. This paper details our design-led research process and builds on emerging literature on designing for digital civic interaction.

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

In this paper we examine the way Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) support forms of community activism that operate outside formal political and institutional channels. We have done fieldwork with local housing justice activists in order to gain insight into the way ICTs play a role in complementing forms of civic engagement that challenge, rather than work with, institutional authority. We argue that ICTs are instrumental in supporting and shaping three alternate information practices' situating, codification, and scaffolding? that each serve the goals of direct democratic engagement. We also show how local activist communities engage in these three practices through their varied use of ICTs, including the ways they provide mechanisms for informal but politically significant? and legitimate? civic engagement.

We are in the midst of a new era of experimentation that blends social and mobile computing in support of digital democracy. These experiments will have potentially long lasting consequences on how the public is invited to partic-ipate in governance by elected as well as professional offi-cials. In this paper, we look at how data from a purpose-built smartphone app we deployed were incorporated into a three-day urban planning event. The data collected were meant to help inform design decisions for new cycling in-frastructure and to provide an alternate means for partici-pating in the planning process. Through our analysis, we point to three distinct roles the data played at the event-as authority, as evidence, and as ambivalent. Each role demonstrates the challenge and potential for turning to crowdsourced data as a form of participation and as a re-source for urban planning.

This paper is about the work we do to create productive partnerships in community settings: developing relationships, demonstrating commitments, and overcoming personal and institutional barriers to community-based design research. Through an ethnographic account of the elements of community-based research normally elided from reports of design process, we explore how the impact of institutional histories and personal relationships went beyond simply identifying potential partners, but fundamentally guided the research questions and approach. We examine the different roles researchers play - researcher, confidant, advocate, interloper, invader, and collaborator - and how those roles create particular relations in the field. The contribution of this work is the development of a reflective account of the research in order to evaluate knowledge production, rigor, and advance methods for engaging in community-based research.

This paper describes the Community Historians project, which was a series of public, participatory workshops focused on conceptualizing and enacting forms of citizen engagement through technology. The goal of the project was to provide the space and resources to discover, discuss, and document inherent communal values and tangible resources present in a low-income community. The result of the first workshop was an interactive, alternative asset map of the area. The second workshop involved residents building their own digital cameras from component parts. The purpose of these activities was to reinforce critical thought about how technology affected the lives of residents and to empower adaptation of technology as a tool for communal development.

CHI researchers are beginning a shift from studying technology use in uncommon or exotic communities to designing and deploying technology interventions into those same settings. This paper picks up on these recent developments and further examines the impact and implication of using a bespoke technology platform within the context of providing shelter and basic social services to homeless mothers and their children. I build on findings from a previous system deployment by describing targeted changes made to the technology, the design impetus for making those changes, and the resulting impact those changes had on the relationship between shelter staff, residents, and the information they shared via the system. By way of the findings reported here, I continue to develop the framing of Deweyan publics as a way to scaffold an environmental approach to technology design in contexts with multiple and diverse stakeholders.

In recent years, the HCI and CSCW communities have begun to examine the role technology plays in personal, rather than professional settings. Part of this work has begun to address a specific class of life events that are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and destabilizing - what we refer to as life disruptions. While each disruption is unique, we find that patterns of social and technical reconfigurations occur in a variety of different contexts. Drawing on three case studies of severe life disruptions - intimate partner violence, homelessness, and death - we remark on the ways that life disruptions prompt a journey towards a "new normal." We enumerate the common lessons learned among our case studies and seek to inform future technology research and design work which may involve life disruptions.

Today, commodity technologies like mobile phones - once symbols of status and wealth - have become deeply woven into social and economic participation in Western society. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, there remain groups who may not have extensive access to them but who are nonetheless deeply affected by their presence in everyday life. In light of this, we designed, built, and deployed a ubiquitous computing system for one such overlooked group: the staff and residents at a shelter for homeless mothers. Our system connects mobile phones, a shared display, and a Web application to help staff and residents stay connected. We report on the adoption and use of this system over the course of a 30 week deployment, discussing the substantial impact our system had on shelter life and the broader implications for such socio-technical systems that sit at the juncture of social action and organizational coordination.

The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary of these two "publics." We describe the design of the Community Resource Messenger (CRM), an ICT that supports both those in need and those attempting to provide care in a challenging environment. The CRM consists of three components: 1) a message center that pools messages to and from mobile users into a shared, persistent forum; 2) a text and voice messaging gateway linking the mobile phones of the homeless with the web-enabled computer facilities of the care providers; 3) a shared message display accessible from mobile texting, voice, e-mail, and the web, helping the two groups communicate and coordinate for mutual good. By democratizing design and use of technology at the margins of society, we aim to engage an entire "urban network," enabling shared awareness and collective action in each public.

The use of ICTs in the public sector has long been touted for its potential to transform the institutions that govern and provide social services. The focus, however, has largely been on systems that are used within particular scales of the public sector, such as at the scale of state or national government, the scale of regional or municipal entity, or at the scale of local service providers. The work presented here takes aim at examining ICT use that crosses these scales of influence and accountability. We report on a year long ethnographic investigation conducted at a variety of social service outlets to understand how a shared information system crosses the boundaries of these very distinct organizations. We put forward that such systems are central to the work done in the public sector and represent a class of collaborative work that has gone understudied.

Video and transcripts of two architectural design meetings are presented in an analysis of a specific design process. The focus of the analysis presented here is the social and cultural aspects of cognition in design. The argument begins with a discussion of the parallels in design studies and cognitive science as each begun to consider the importance of environmental influences in how we design and how we think. By applying three situated frameworks to understand the situated nature of design meetings, the analysis shows that notions of social creation and cultural cognition are complimentary and necessary when trying to understand how the design process works.

The Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology provides a comprehensive framework for advancing a value-centered research and design agenda. Although VSD provides helpful ways of thinking about and designing value-centered computational systems, we argue that the specific mechanics of VSD create thorny tensions with respect to value sensitivity. In particular, we examine limitations due to value classifications, inadequate guidance on empirical tools for design, and the ways in which the design process is ordered. In this paper, we propose ways of maturing the VSD methodology to overcome these limitations and present three empirical case studies that illustrate a family of methods to effectively engage local expressions of values. The findings from our case studies provide evidence of how we can mature the VSD methodology to mitigate the pitfalls of classification and engender a commitment to reflect on and respond to local contexts of design.

Technology, it is argued, has the potential to improve everyone's life: from the workplace, to entertainment, to easing chores around the home. But what of people who have neither job nor home? We undertook a qualitative study of the homeless population in a metropolitan U.S. city to better understand what it means to be homeless and how technology--from cell phones to bus passes--affects their daily lives. The themes we identify provide an array of opportunities for technological interventions that can empower the homeless population. Our investigation also reveals the need to reexamine some of the assumptions made in HCI about the relationship people have with technology. We suggest a broader awareness of the social context of technology use as a critical component when considering design innovation for the homeless.

Nonprofit social service organizations provide the backbone of social support infrastructure in the U.S. and around the world. As the ecology of information exchange moves evermore digital, nonprofit organizations with limited resources and expertise struggle to keep pace. We present a qualitative investigation of two nonprofit outreach centers providing service to the homeless in a U.S. metropolitan city. Despite similar goals shared by these organizations, apparent differences in levels of computerization, volunteerism, and organizational structure demonstrate the challenges in attempting to adopt technology systems when resources and technical expertise are highly constrained.

How can designers of ubiquitous computing technologies ensure that they understand the non-functional needs, values, and expectations of end-users? In this paper, we use a qualitative method from public policy to elicit reflective feedback from end-users about technologies that they may not yet have used nor fully comprehend. Our study uncovers information about end-user perceptions of RFID, including a range of "folk theories" held by the public about this technology, and their associations of it with certain social groups and values. We argue that these perceptions can limit technological adoption, and conclude with a discussion of challenges for the design and deployment of ubiquitous computing systems.