Culture in Action: Unpacking Capacities to Inform Assets-Based Design

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The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aims at securing a lasting impact for technology-based interventions in the context of social inequities. Increasingly, HCI scholars are proposing assets-based design as an effective approach towards this issue. Rather than starting from people's needs and deficits, this approach posits that design should start from a deep understanding of people's assets. A pending issue, however, is how to account for the situated nature of assets; that is, how to decide which asset to leverage and for what design purpose. Drawing from cultural sociology and shifting the emphasis from assets to capacities, we propose Swidler's theory of culture-in-action as an analytical lens for unpacking the complex relationship between capacities, goals, and structural limitations. Leveraging findings from a Participatory Design engagement with 35 Latino immigrant parents for envisioning parent-education technologies, we demonstrate the applicability of this lens. We contribute to HCI scholarship by further discussing 1) how to analyze capacities' design potential, and 2) the methodological particularities for collecting them.