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.
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.
Despite high approval ratings for unions and growing worker interest in organizing, employees in the United States still face significant barriers to securing collective bargaining agreements. A key factor is employer counter-organizing: efforts to suppress unionization through rule changes, retaliation, and disruption. Designing sociotechnical tools and strategies to resist these tactics requires a deeper understanding of the role computing technologies play in counter-organizing against unionization. In this paper, we examine three high-profile organizing efforts–at Amazon, Starbucks, and Boston University–using publicly available sources to identify four recurring technological tactics: surveillance, spacing, screaming and scabbing. We analyze how these tactics operate across contexts, highlighting their digital dimensions and strategic deployment. We conclude with implications for organizing in digitally-mediated workplaces, directions for future research, and emergent forms of worker resistance.
This study investigates how Southeast Asian (SEA) immigrant mothers in Taiwan participate in their children’s home-based learning. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and diary studies, we explore how these mothers navigate sociocultural constraints while fostering engagement and transmitting cultural values. Despite facing diminished agency and structural marginalization, mothers engage creatively in their children’s everyday learning interactions. Guided by a justice-oriented lens, we identify various harms and propose design implications for socio-technical systems that center recognition, reciprocity, and accountability in parent-child learning at the individual, familial, and societal levels. Our contribution lies in foregrounding the role of intersectional identity in parent-child learning and proposing justice-oriented design directions that support the flourishing of immigrant mothers within socio-technical systems.
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.
Online platforms have become a key avenue for forming new relationships, especially for queer individuals. However, some individuals, such as those in asexual and aromantic communities (A-Spec), seek forms of relationships that trouble existing frameworks assumed by online platforms, such as dating apps. To investigate A-Spec needs, we conducted an 8-week ARC study with 38 A-Spec participants who have used online platforms for developing relationships. Participants described a mismatch between the design of dating apps and their approach to building relationships, suggesting platform design that combines affordances of dating apps and other social platforms. We thus outline a ``process-oriented'' paradigm for relationship-building platforms inspired by community design suggestions, supporting participants' process of first establishing a low-stakes relationship and then co-constructing its properties. We also argue for a ``pluralized'' approach to defining identity and relationship in the design of online systems, upsetting default assumptions surrounding any given label.
Marginalized communities often face interconnected barriers that undermine well-being, yet design methods rarely explicitly account for how disadvantages compound or how strengths can reinforce each other. Building on Capability Sensitive Design (CSD), this research extends the framework to address corrosive disadvantages—barriers that undermine multiple capabilities—and fertile functionings—capabilities that positively reinforce others. We applied this extended framework in a participatory study with newcomers to Canada. Using capability hierarchy mapping, co-design workshop, and field study, we identified key capability gaps and their interconnectedness, surfaced community knowledge, and translated values into actionable design requirements. Our findings show that explicitly mapping advantages and disadvantages enables more targeted, contextually grounded interventions. We conclude with methodological guidance for applying this approach to other marginalized contexts in HCI, where designing for equity requires accounting for how capabilities interact.