Climate change, urbanization, and pollution threaten ecosystems and the treaty-guaranteed rights of Native Nations in the Great Lakes region. Tools that support culturally relevant implementation of policy and meaningful access to environmental data for sentinel species like Manoomin, wild rice, can help uphold treaty rights and ensure environmental stewardship. This paper presents Noondawind, an interactive data platform co-designed with Ojibwe partners to support community members and Tribal staff in interpreting and acting on environmental data and policy resources. We engaged in a participatory design process informed by and deeply integrated with Ojibwe worldviews. Our results highlight how participatory and culturally relevant co-design approaches can enhance environmental governance, support data sovereignty, and foster engagement with environmental data. We offer design implications and lessons learned for projects developing tools in partnership with Indigenous communities. These findings contribute to the growing field of Indigenous HCI and social justice literature in HCI.
Internet Aesthetics are personal styles that are curated, instantiated, and remade on social media through collections of art, fashion, sensory experiences, literature, and media to communicate and share lifestyle narratives. BIPOC users often use Internet Aesthetics on TikTok as identity-making tools. However, they may experience algorithmic symbolic annihilation in which the platform neglects the existence of BIPOC in particular Internet Aesthetics, reducing their agency over their online identity-making. Using semi-structured interviews, we identify how BIPOC users understand Internet Aesthetics and what strategies BIPOC use to engage with them on TikTok. We discuss how BIPOC users apply algorithmic folk theories and offline strategies to resist symbolic annihilation while engaging in identity-making by extracting joy and meaning from Internet Aesthetics. We also model the uncertainty BIPOC users face around experiencing symbolic annihilation using the concept of microaggressions and give guidance on designing tools to addressing this phenomenon.
Technology has the potential to enhance safety by supporting community-driven strategies. However, current safety technologies often narrowly frame safety as preventing violence, without incorporating the community-centered strategies essential to well-being for transgender, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC). We conducted 22 interviews with TBIPOC individuals to understand their safety challenges, experiences navigating violence, and safety strategies. Our findings reveal that safety is not only the absence of harm but also the presence of trust, connection, collective care, and mutual aid. Participants emphasized survival resources like self-defense training and trans-specific spaces, alongside joy rooted in community and support. We argue that community is not separate from safety; it is its foundation. This work contributes fundamental knowledge about TBIPOCs’ experiences and design implications for technologies that affirm TBIPOC lives. Designing for TBIPOC safety requires shifting toward community-centered technologies and non-technological approaches that prioritize lived experiences, mutual aid, and collective joy.
Mainstream digital technologies tend to be designed without reflection on how the way they structure knowledge can decontextualise it from its surroundings, affecting different cultural groups. In this work, we discuss how community-led databases could be created while accounting for Indigenous values and land-based wisdoms, following a collaboration with Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, an organisation of Masewal People. Emerging from metaphors of sowing, growing and harvesting, a series of activities entwining technology with traditional knowledge systems were crafted. In response, exploratory roles and assemblies were created as data practices, reimagining the ancestral self-organisation processes, language and views that have shaped Masewal autonomy and self determination. The work demonstrates how Indigenous knowledges can reframe ways of thinking about technology, creating a digital territory that extends intricate relations with the land as a living entity. This study contributes relational approaches to data, technologies and participation, emphasising community context, Indigenous research methods and collective wellbeing.
Although generative AI is being deployed into classrooms with promises of aiding teachers, educators caution that these tools can have unintended pedagogical repercussions, including cultural misrepresentation and bias. These concerns are heightened in low-resource language and Indigenous education settings, where AI systems frequently underperform. We investigate these challenges in Hawai`i, where public schools operate under a statewide mandate to integrate Hawaiian language and culture into education. Through four co-design workshops with 22 public school educators, we surfaced concerns about using generative AI in educational settings, particularly around cultural misrepresentation and corresponding designs for auditing tools that address these issues. We find that educators envision tools grounded in specific Hawaiian cultural values and practices, such as tracing the genealogy of knowledge in source materials. Building on these insights, we conceptualize AI auditing as a community-oriented process rather than the work of isolated individuals, and discuss implications for designing auditing tools.
This paper positions Black Studies as a foundational analytic for Emancipatory HCI, showing how Afropessimism and Afrofuturism together model a praxis for designing otherwise worlds. Afropessimism offers a diagnostic lens for understanding how anti-Blackness structures the epistemic, institutional, and sociotechnical foundations of HCI, while Afrofuturism highlights the fugitive, kin-making, and improvisational practices through which people craft openings within those systems. Through three case studies, we examine how Black communities engage, appropriate, and transform sociotechnical systems in everyday life. These examples illuminate practices of accountability, attunement, and collective sensemaking that unsettle dominant design assumptions. We draw out design takeaways that challenge HCI’s inherited paradigms and demonstrate why Black Studies is indispensable for those seeking to expand and deepen Emancipatory HCI.
Technologies like online support networks and safety apps hold promise for improving personal safety. However, these tools often fail to address the widespread violence against gender-diverse individuals, particularly transgender Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC) in the United States. To better understand technology's role in managing safety among TBIPOC individuals, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews. We found that participants engaged in what we call safety labor, the emotional and cognitive work of managing misrecognition, assessing risk, and downplaying discomfort to maintain self-preservation. Visibly-trans participants faced greater vulnerability and tended to feel safer when their trans identity was not visible. Technology enabled sharing locations and rides, and sending coded messages. Findings highlight the need for tailored technologies that protect privacy and help TBIPOC individuals when they experience violence. Our research contributes a deeper understanding of TBIPOC experiences and informs technology development to promote TBIPOCs’ safety.