Knowledge dissemination should not be treated as an afterthought to research and design efforts, particularly those that aim to center the experiences and expertise of minoritized communities. This pictorial visualizes the dissemination of an intergenerational participatory speculative design project focused on imagining community sociotechnical futures beyond anti-Black surveillance, where senior and youth community members collectively articulated their visions through designing a series of children's picture books. We document the processes, outcomes, and reflections involved in preparing and organizing a community-based children's book reading event as a form of knowledge dissemination. By foregrounding knowledge dissemination as a creative and communal site of gathering, dialogue, and the cultivation and celebration of joy, we invite HCI researchers and designers to consider how the dissemination of research and design outcomes can foster meaningful sociomaterial infrastructures within and beyond engaged communities.

Storyboarding is a key method in design research and practice, widely used for ideation, communication, and critique of design prototypes. This article repositions storyboards as critical design artifacts with discursive and material power that mediates expertise and imaginaries of design futures. Drawing from a case study of a participatory speculative design project with Black older adults and youth, I advocate for a participatory turn in storyboarding, demonstrating how it can serve as a generative space for storytelling, collaboration, and learning. By asking how we might redistribute the power to storyboard, I argue that participatory storyboarding opens up new possibilities for rethinking the epistemic, representational, and performative stakes of this practice. I conclude with practical implications for human-computer interaction design research and user experience education, calling for approaching storyboarding as a relational, political, and situated method that can challenge dominant narratives of technology design and expertise.

U.S. public housing is historically a site of racialized and carceral surveillance. Digital surveillance technologies reinforce this containment by mediating carceral visuality, the institutionalized visual and analytic lenses that shape perceptions and governance of public housing spaces and residents. This paper presents a videovoice project with a public housing community, for which residents used smartphones to capture their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries in relation to surveillance. We analyze how these video artifacts enact alternative ways of seeing and knowing, surfacing overlooked routines, relations, and critiques of surveillance. These videos document what is often invisibilized: the lived consequences of carceral visuality and the situated knowledge of those surveilled. We propose “counter-visual artifacts” to describe the political and disruptive role these videos play in challenging dominant visual regimes and reclaiming the right to see and be seen otherwise. By advocating for counter-visual sensibilities, we invite HCI scholars to rethink how artifacts make room for alternative ways of seeing.

This paper reconsiders knowledge sharing as a relational process of disorientation and reorientation, which is a way of turning toward others, the world, and possible futures. Drawing on an intergenerational participatory speculative design project in a historically Black neighborhood, we show how seniors and youth shared knowledge of turning toward the affective, more-than-human relations, as well as toward one another and collective futures. These practices reoriented participants across differences toward one another and their community, cultivating new cross-generational relationships and shared imagination. Building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation and Black feminist thought, we argue that knowledge sharing is less about efficiency or productivity and more about relational alignment—negotiating how communities come together and move together toward otherwise futures. For HCI, this critical reframing foregrounds the racialized histories and everyday labors that sustain collective orientations, urging scholars and designers to consider how communities can collectively (re)orient themselves epistemically and ontologically through design, and what otherwise worlds those reorientations make possible.

This paper rethinks everyday design by shifting from materially available, physical “surroundings” as design resources to the unsettled, open-ended, and politically entangled “surrounds” as sites of practice. Drawing from ethnographies in New York City and Detroit, we describe how urban communities rehearse alternative ways of living and relating by navigating the interstices of layered infrastructures of governance and development. Rather than locating agency in oppositional acts of resistance or formal interventions, we show how everyday design can unfold through improvisational collectives and situated practices that have yet to be captured or defined by any single layer of dominant infrastructure, but emerge in-between them. We propose surrounds as a generative analytic for understanding the subtle, often fleeting experiments through which people enact alternative relations to governance and order. Positioning everyday design as navigational, rather than apolitical or oppositional, offers HCI new ways to understand the positionalities of design, intervention, and alternatives amid shifting urban sociotechnical conditions.

This paper examines how informal care work in community-based aging systems is assetized through the institutionalization of timebanking. Drawing on long-term ethnography following the implementation of digital timebanking systems as part of government-led aging-in-community initiatives in Shanghai, this paper teases out the labor of navigating multi-layered temporal tensions in informal caregiving, from interactional to personal to generational. We demonstrate how present informal care work has been transformed into exchangeable, bankable, and quantifiable assets, promising future social and economic benefits. We analyze how timebanking assetizes, institutionalizes, and governs informal care work by mobilizing younger generations of older adults (i.e., those recently retired) to perform unpaid caregiving for older generations in the communities under the rhetoric of mutual support and uncertain promises of future care. We discuss how CSCW can critically engage with the temporal navigations that are integral to informal care work, particularly in the context of demographic shifts, labor shortages, and the broken formal aging care infrastructure. From there, we question whether timebanking constitutes a sustainable sociotechnical alternative to formal care systems, or if it is increasingly co-opted for labor extraction that reproduces the precarity of aging futures.

Abstract Handled by a constellation of public and private institutions, the COVID-19 vaccine infrastructure in the U.S. was largely fragmented when it first emerged. By looking into the early phases of the COVID-19 vaccination distribution among older adults in the U.S. state of Florida, this work attends to the “last-mile logistics” of vaccine infrastructure—the final leg of distribution, where vaccines meet their intended end consumers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with older adults and the volunteers who supported them in securing vaccination appointments, we illustrate the complexities of the last mile and the challenges faced by older adults in navigating distribution. We then demonstrate how volunteers and older adults came together as an emerging assemblage to collectively perform what we term “last-mile work”—a specific form of infrastructuring undertaken in the last mile to resolve localized logistic or operational challenges within a larger infrastructural arrangement. This paper introduces last-mile work as a critical yet under-theorized form of infrastructuring that is indispensable to infrastructure’s everyday function. We argue that last-mile work offers an important analytical lens and empirical site for future infrastructural investigations in CSCW research and design. It creates new entry points to rethink the assumed relationships between infrastructuring work and temporal breakdowns, while also surfacing critical questions of labor, power, and (in)visibility within the last mile of infrastructures.

Economic crises such as the global recession and financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, have elevated new forms of economic cooperation. Supporting efforts in finding alternatives to capitalism requires understanding the role of design in imagining alternative economic futures and reaching those most harmed by current capitalistic models. Through a collaboration between a community organization in Detroit and a team of university researchers, we hosted and facilitated a five-week workshop series with Black and Brown working-class Detroiters where they collectively imagined alternative economic futures using speculative design. They proposed Community Capitalism, Childcare Collectives, and Village-Based Childcare as alternative economy concepts from the workshops and described their unique characteristics and traits of love, care, and inclusion. Aligning with generative justice frameworks, Detroiters prioritized sustainable families and communities. We contribute an understanding of technology’s role in the imagined economic futures, a discussion of what this means for community-involved governance, and a push for centering Afrofuturism in speculative design approaches to foster futures literacy.

Noticing differently commits to stepping out of familiar reference frameworks while attending to oft-neglected actors, relations, and ways of knowing for design. Photovoice is an arts- and community-based participatory approach allowing individuals to communicate their lives and stories about pressing community concerns through photography. This paper bridges photovoice and the commitment to noticing in HCI and design through a photovoice project with Detroit residents on safety and surveillance. The photovoice process—alongside the production, reflection, and dissemination of photographs—makes residents’ everyday situations legible and sensible, allowing both community members and researchers to orient to and engage with multiple viewpoints, sensibilities, and temporal trajectories. This process confronts the invisibility of both the sociotechnical infrastructures (in our case, surveillance infrastructures) and minoritized communities’ relational ontologies. By advocating participatory noticing in design research, we show the opportunities for adopting arts- and community-based participatory approaches in decentering dominant ways of knowing and seeing, while at the same time fostering community capacity and relations for future potentialities.

Safety has been used to justify the expansion of today’s large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited 11 Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of “everyday noticing” in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents’ lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities.

Independent movie theaters (IMTs) are a part of the cultural infrastructure that offers shared spaces for patron communities to access, share, and engage with cultural artifacts. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, IMTs were mandated to shut down, resulting in unanticipated infrastructural breakdown. Drawing insights from a preliminary survey and interviews with staff members from 18 IMTs in the U.S., this paper attends to how this breakdown disrupted art and community engagement within patron communities. We investigate the sociotechnical practices of maintaining cultural infrastructure through 1) collaborating with community partners and external stakeholders, 2) screening films through online virtual cinema platforms, and 3) retaining community members through online platforms. Our work highlights the tensions and invisible human labor in this maintenance work. Together, this work intends to foreground cultural infrastructure and discuss how HCI can support and contribute to the design and oft-invisible maintenance of cultural infrastructure.

Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.

During the COVID-19 global health crisis, institutions, policymakers, and academics alike have called for practicing resilience to overcome its ongoing disruptions. This paper contributes a comparative study of the job search experiences of working-class and upper-middle-class job seekers, particularly in relation to their resilience practices during the pandemic. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 working-class and 11 upper-middle-class job seekers in the U.S., we unpack challenges resulting from both the pandemic and unemployment and job seekers' novel practices of navigating these challenges in their everyday disrupted life. Job seekers' ongoing negotiation with their resources, situations, and surroundings gives practical meanings to building everyday resilience, which we theorize as an ongoing process of becoming resilient. While job seekers across classes experienced similar challenges, working-class job seekers took on additional emotional labor in their everyday resilience due to their limited experience in the digital job search space, competition with higher-degree holding job seekers applying for the same jobs, limited social support networks, and at times, isolation. By foregrounding the uneven distribution of emotional labor in realizing the promise of resilience along class lines, this work cautions against the romanticization of resilience and calls for a more critical and nuanced understanding of resilience in CSCW.

This article contributes results of a longitudinal field study of SkillsIdentifier, an employment tool originally designed and assessed in the United States (U.S.), to support “underrepresented” job seekers in identifying and articulating their employment skills. To understand whether the tool could support the needs of job seekers outside the U.S., we assessed it among 16 job seekers with limited education and language resources in Switzerland. While many of our results mirrored those of the U.S., we found that the tool was especially beneficial for non-French speaking immigrants who needed support describing their skills outside of their native language. We also found that listing skills like “active listening” without important context was insufficient and risked hiding key skills and meaning behind those skills to employers. Taking these factors into account, we illustrate the design implications of our findings and directions for practitioners who wish to design employment tools in support of job seekers, especially those who have traditionally been excluded from the labor market. We then provide insight into the potential for unintended consequences as a result of focusing solely on skills in a post-COVID labor market and contribute ways to mitigate them.

Digital educational technologies have been employed in classrooms to collect students’ behavioral data in the hope of supporting teachers in identifying and correcting undesirable behaviors, which raises the concern of heightened surveillance in classrooms. We present a qualitative study of 20 K-8 teachers to understand their experiences and practices of using ClassDojo, a data-driven classroom behavior management intervention. Our analysis reveals a series of unintended socio-technical effects resulting from the use of ClassDojo in practice. In particular, the use of ClassDojo runs the risk of measuring, codifying, and simplifying the nuanced psycho-social factors that may drive children’s behavior and performance, thereby serving as a “Band-Aid” for deeper issues. We discuss how this process could perpetuate existing inequality and bias in education. With the goals of spurring future design and mitigating these unintended effects, we take on the reflexive-interventionist approach and propose three considerations for designing and using future educational technologies: 1) provide context, 2) expose bias, and 3) challenge and reimagine what is normal.

Online employment resources are now as important as offline personal and professional networks, which have been pivotal in finding employment. However, it is unclear, which specific online resources are key to employment and how job seekers take advantage of them. Therefore, in an online survey of 768 job seekers, we investigated which online platforms, specific job search phases, behaviors, and job search strategies job seekers used in their job search, and which of these were associated with positive outcomes. We examined whether these results correlated with demographic factors and found differences in online platform use among income, gender, years of education, and race. Our results suggest that higher-income job seekers were more likely to use different strategies and more likely to get callbacks than lower-income job seekers. We raise new questions around demographics and technology and discuss the need for practitioners to design for a wider variety of job seekers.

Social media has become an effective recruitment tool for higher-waged and white-collar professionals. Yet, past studies have questioned its effectiveness for the recruitment of lower-waged workers. It is also unclear whether or how employers leverage social media in their recruitment of low-wage job seekers, and how social media could better support the needs of both stakeholders. Therefore, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with employers of low-wage workers in the U.S. We found that employers: use social media, primarily Facebook, to access large pools of active low-wage job seekers; and recognize indirect signals about low-wage job seekers’ commitment and job readiness. Our work suggests that there remains a visible, yet unaddressed power imbalance between low-wage workers and employers in the use of social media, which risks further destabilizing the precarious labor market.

Today, teachers have been increasingly relying on data-driven technologies to track and monitor student behavior data for classroom management. Drawing insights from interviews with 20 K--8 teachers, in this paper we unpack how teachers enacted both care and control through their data work in collecting, interpreting, and using student behavior data. In this process, teachers found themselves subject to surveilling gazes from parents, school administrators, and students. As a result, teachers had to manipulate the student behavior data to navigate the balance between presenting a professional image to surveillants and enacting care/control that they deemed appropriate. In this paper we locate two nuanced forms of teachers' data work that have been under-studied in CSCW: (1) data work as recontextualizing meanings and (2) data work as resisting surveillance. We discuss teachers' struggle over (in)visibility and their negotiation of autonomy and subjectivity in these two forms of data work. We highlight the importance of foregrounding and making space for informal data workers' (in our case, teachers') resistance and negotiation of autonomy in light of datafication.

In January 2019, the Chinese Communist Party launched the online platform XueXi QiangGuo, which translates into "Learning for the Rise of China." Within two months, XueXi became the top-downloaded item of the month on Apple's App Store in China. In response, we conducted an interview study with 28 active XueXi users to investigate their uses and gratifications of this state-owned online platform. Our results reveal seven key motivations: compliance, self-status seeking, general information seeking, job support, entertainment, patriotism, and learning. This state-owned platform introduced a new model for official information dissemination and political communication through direct surveillance and monitoring, leveraging and fostering emotional attachment, and offering heterogeneous apolitical content. We discuss the intended and unintended ramifications of these components, highlighting the importance of future CSCW research to critically engage with pluralist political narratives situated in varied societies, especially non-Western democracies.

Technology allows us to scale the number of jobs we search for and apply to, train for work, and earn money online. However, these technologies do not benefit all job seekers equally and must be designed to better support the needs of underserved job seekers. Research suggests that underserved job seekers prefer employment technologies that can support them in articulating their skills and experiences and in identifying pathways to achieve their career goals. Therefore, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of DreamGigs, a tool that identifies the skills job seekers need to reach their dream jobs and presents volunteer and employment opportunities for them to acquire those skills. Our evaluation results show that DreamGigs aids in the process of personal empowerment. We contribute design implications for mitigating aspects of powerlessness that low-resource job seekers experience and discuss ways to promote action-taking in these job seekers.

Modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) support job searches, resume creation, career development, and professional self-presentation. However, these technological tools are often tailored to high-income, highly educated users and white-collar professionals. It is unclear what interventions address the needs of job seekers who have limited resources or education, or who may be underserved in other ways. We gathered insights from the literature and generated ten tangible design concepts to address the needs of underserved job seekers. We then conducted a needs validation and speed dating study to understand which concepts were most viable among our population. We found that the three most preferred concepts immediately addressed job seekers' social and personal needs, where addressing social needs meant mediating job seekers' connections to others and supporting our job seekers' limited access to strong ties.