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.

This study examines how digital awareness content on social media and other platforms is perceived by individuals affected by gender-based violence, focusing on its role in recognizing abuse and initiating early help-seeking. Drawing on 63 survey responses and 12 interviews with individuals who self-identified as having experienced GBV, we analyze how participants described, reflected on, and engaged with awareness content. Our findings show that such content often served as an entry point for processing experiences and building recognition, while also carrying risks of retraumatization and emotional overload when poorly designed. Participants emphasized that recognition and information-seeking are gradual, nonlinear processes shaped by emotional readiness and informal supports, yet much current awareness content overlooks this reality, pushing immediate reporting rather than supporting the slow work of sense-making. This work contributes to HCI by offering trauma-informed design strategies for awareness content and platforms that foster recognition and respect user agency.

This paper presents a feminist autoethnographic critique of technology and research on gender-based violence, grounded in my lived experience and current work as an HCI researcher engaged in community-led design on forced marriage and broader gender-based violence. Through chronological narratives, I recount encounters with digital technologies during help-seeking, from early online searches to the quiet work of rebuilding life, alongside reflections from my position as a researcher embedded in my own community and observing how HCI engages with it. These accounts reveal how digital interventions often fail to align with the realities of those affected, whether by prematurely pushing legal solutions, vanishing after research funding, or reinforcing harmful labels such as “victim.” I argue for HCI approaches that sustain tools beyond prototypes, translate research into practice, and attend to language and power, calling for research and design that begins with those most impacted: not spoken for, but speaking.

Third sector organizations that address gender-based violence often rely on makeshift tools to manage complex, emotionally intensive casework. Although digital systems promise structure, most fail to support the narrative, relational, and time-sensitive nature of frontline support. This paper presents the design, development, and deployment of CaseCompass, a digital case management system co-created with the Competence Center against Forced Marriages, a national NGO in Switzerland. The project emerged from a long-term, trust-based collaboration and foregrounded organizational priorities, care practices, and long-term sustainability. Rather than treating the tool as the endpoint, we use its creation as a lens to examine how participation can be structured under severe time and capacity constraints, and how design decisions can serve as infrastructural care. We contribute to feminist and social justice-oriented HCI by offering a detailed case study of community-led infrastructuring within a small NGO, articulating strategies for structuring participation under constraints, and framing sustainability as an active practice of care, responsibility, and justice.

Knowledge workers face increasing challenges in managing numerous digital tasks, often leading to long task lists that distract from completing the most important ones.We present AIRbar, a task management tool designed to enhance Awareness, I ntention, and Retrospection (AIR) in daily task management.AIRbar prompts workers to prioritize a maximum of three daily tasks, displays them in an always-on glanceable widget, and facilitates end-of-day reflection to improve task completion and self-awareness.In a 4-week field study with 35 participants, we found that AIRbar increased task completion rates, improved focus and motivation, and positively influenced perceptions of work processes.These findings suggest that limiting the number of tasks and ensuring continuous visibility of priorities can address key challenges in modern task management, providing actionable insights for designing future task management systems.