Sociocultural Factors in Digital Skills Learning: A Community-Based Intervention Among U.S. Public Housing AdultsDigital skills are essential for engaging in employment, healthcare, education, and government services. However, the digital divide remains a social inequality, especially among marginalized populations. Through a community-engaged research approach, we conducted a digital skills learning intervention in a U.S. public housing community, where residents frequently face socioeconomic challenges and limited access to digital resources. Public housing is a community seldom explored in CSCW and HCI research and provides a unique context to study the ongoing digital skills gap. Through the lens of situated learning theory, we study how sociocultural factors impact the efficacy of a community-based computer skills learning intervention. Specifically, we examine how the public housing community organized various resources---online learning materials, instructors, peer social support, and on-the-job learning opportunities---for digital skills development. Notably, the training leveraged instructor critical care and peer support to develop a learning community between residents and leaders of the community NGO that continued beyond the formalized training program. We contribute to CSCW and HCI work on collective and assets-based approaches to enhancing digital capacity. Our work provides implications for building collective grassroots digital skills learning infrastructure that could create new digitally-engaged employment opportunities.2025SLSoyoung Lee et al.Digital Divides, Digital LiteracyCSCW
The Development of a New Measure of Collective Digital Literacy: Community Digital CapacityThis article theorizes and proposes a novel construct, community digital capacity, to measure collective digital capacity at a community level. Community digital capacity is the extent to which the culture, infrastructure, and digital competence of family and community enable and support digital practices. We address a critical gap in individual digital literacy assessments and address limitations with existing theories that do not show digital inequities in the context of underlying systemic and structural challenges posed by one's social position. Building on insights from Computer Supportive Cooperative Work and Social Computing and Human-Computer Interaction for Development communities, we recognize that digital training initiatives must shift toward critical cultural and social practices that encourage full participation in community affairs. Accordingly, we created 28 items covering three domains---individual, social, and infrastructure. We conducted cognitive interviews with a public housing community to refine the items and capture the construct fully. We assessed their factor structure in two Southeastern Michigan cohorts. After dropping eight items based on contribution to Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), the public housing residents exhibit a two-factor structure (SRMR=0.09) consisting of nearly independent factors for the individual and social domains, with all items loading positively on their respective domain. We contribute an initial measure for researchers and practitioners to assess community members' access to shared digital resources and support, offering a tool to assess broader social and structural factors contributing to the digital divide.2025TDTawanna R Dillahunt et al.Digital Divides, Digital LiteracyCSCW
Cataloging Augmented, Ambivalent Transgender Futures: Designing Inclusive AR Technologies for Trans Communities Through Speculative, Participatory Zine-MakingTechnologies designed to support marginalized communities have often led to unintended harm. This frequently occurs when misaddressing or failing to understand communities' experiences, needs, and desires. User-centered research often focus on needs versus desires (leveraging deficit versus assets-based approaches), which have been contested in HCI. To promote technology design that better balances the tensions between needs and desires, we contribute participatory zine-making as an effective approach for speculatively designing trans augmented reality (AR) technologies. We facilitated in-person and virtual workshops with trans participants (n=44) focused on designing AR technologies, observing participants' zine-making processes and artifacts to gather visual ethnographic data alongside transcripts and facilitator field notes. In participants' zines we identified ambivalence as critical in addressing trans people's needs and desires, and participants conveyed this ambivalence through metaphor and anti-assimilationist aesthetics. Our participatory zine-making approach enabled us to uncover perspectives and design implications crucial to designing trans technologies.2025FKF. Ria Khan et al.University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, School of InformationAR Navigation & Context AwarenessInclusive DesignLGBTQ+ Community Technology DesignCHI
Opportunities for Social Media to Support Aspiring Entrepreneurs with Financial ConstraintsSocial media offers an alternative source for entrepreneurs to expand their social networks and obtain relevant resources to support their ambitions. Aspiring entrepreneurs with limited access to resources and social networks might rely more on the opportunities that social media tools offer. However, aspiring entrepreneurs facing financial constraints who must navigate social media to realize their economic dreams often face challenges. Because aspiring entrepreneurs are transitioning to entrepreneurship, they must construct and even adapt to new work-role identities and new requisite skills, behaviors, attitudes, and patterns of interactions. In a re-analysis of a sub-sample of data from two empirical studies, this work examines how aspiring entrepreneurs living in a financially-constrained environment seek informational, social, and emotional support online and navigate their transition to entrepreneurship. These entrepreneurs obtained informational and emotional resources from observing other members' posts in online communities, including the next steps needed to adapt to their desired small business work roles. However, few publicly disclosed their informational or emotional needs online. We extend existing research on financially-constrained entrepreneurs' use of social media, contributing insights into how these resource-seeking practices limit their exploration of alternative entrepreneurial identities and feedback. We also contribute design implications to facilitate their online disclosure practices, including offering suggestions about ways to respond to questions and other disclosures in ways that restore trust and mitigate identity threats.2023AIAarti Israni et al.Vulnerable Populations and Marginalized GroupsCSCW
Eliciting Alternative Economic Futures with Working-Class Detroiters: Centering Afrofuturism in Speculative DesignEconomic 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.2023TDTawanna R Dillahunt et al.Empowerment of Marginalized GroupsDesign FictionDIS
Participatory Noticing through Photovoice: Engaging Arts- and Community-Based Approaches in Design ResearchNoticing 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.2023ALAlex Jiahong Lu et al.Community Engagement & Civic TechnologyInclusive DesignParticipatory DesignDIS
Shifting from Surveillance-as-Safety to Safety-through-Noticing: A Photovoice Study with Eastside Detroit ResidentsSafety 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 eleven 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.2023ALAlex Lu et al.University of MichiganTechnology Ethics & Critical HCISustainable HCICHI
Understanding Food Planning Strategies of Food Insecure Populations: Implications for Food Agentic TechnologiesTo identify technological opportunities to better support nutrition security and equality among those living in low-socioeconomic situations, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews and seven in-home visits of lower- to middle-income households from a mid-sized city in northern Indiana. Inspired by assets-based approaches to public health, we investigated technology's role in supporting how participants selected and purchased food, planned meals, and worked through logistical barriers to obtain food. Technology helped participants identify sales and coupons, search for recipes and health-related insights to address diet and health concerns, and share information. We contribute design implications (e.g., amplifying optimization behaviors and social engagement, leveraging substitutions) in support of food agency. We further contribute three emergent archetypes to convey central shopping tendencies (i.e., inventory shoppers, menu planners, and adaptive shoppers) and identify corresponding design implications. We situate our results into nutrition decision-making and education, social psychology, food consumer studies, and HCI literature.2023TDTawanna R Dillahunt et al.University of MichiganDiet Tracking & Nutrition ManagementSustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
Trust, Reciprocity, and the Role of Timebanks as Intermediaries: Design Implications for Addressing Healthcare Transportation BarriersMillions of Americans forego medical care due to a lack of non-emergency transportation, particularly minorities, older adults, and those who have disabilities or chronic conditions. Our study investigates the potential for using timebanks---community-based voluntary services that encourage exchanges of services for ``time dollars'' rather than money---in interventions to address healthcare transportation barriers to seed design implications for a future affordable ridesharing platform. In partnership with a timebank and a federally qualified healthcare center (FQHC), 30 participants completed activity packets and 29 of them attended online workshop sessions. Our findings suggest that promoting trust between drivers and riders requires systems that prioritize safety and reliability; yet, there were discrepancies in the ability of the timebank and FQHC to moderate trust. We also found that timebank supports reciprocity, but healthcare transportation requires additional support to ensure balanced reciprocity. We explain these findings drawing from network closure and trust literature. Finally, we contribute design implications for systems that promote trust and facilitate relational over transactional interactions, which help to promote reciprocity and reflect participants’ values.2022TDTawanna R Dillahunt et al.University of MichiganTeleoperated DrivingRidesharing PlatformsClimate Change Communication ToolsCHI
A Library of People': Online Resource-Seeking in Low-Income CommunitiesSocial media platforms provide access to informational and emotional resources that can enable low-income populations to further their socioeconomic mobility and cope with unexpected life demands. However, lack of both interpersonal trust and a sense of shared identity often prevent low-income individuals from eliciting resources from the diverse networks embedded in these platforms. Building on past research, we investigated factors that facilitated and deterred low-income members of the community-based non-profit organization Family Support Network (FSN) from seeking informational and emotional support from other members on the organization’s social media platform, UpLifted. We found that despite participants' perceived shared identity, members primarily requested resources from other UpLifted members through offline interactions due to lack of interpersonal trust. We extend existing research on the limitations of shared identity and the role of interpersonal trust and social norms in facilitating resource-seeking interactions among strangers in low-income contexts. We suggest that social media platforms incorporate pseudonymous posting to facilitate relationship development and allow users to disclose their needs without revealing identifying information.2021AIAarti Israni et al.Connecting and Reaching OutCSCW
Elucidating Skills for Job Seekers: Insights and Critical Concerns from a Field Deployment in SwitzerlandThis 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.2021MCMauro Cherubini et al.Job Search & Employment SupportParticipatory DesignDIS
Examining Mobility Among People Living with HIV in Rural AreasThe rise of ridesharing platforms has transformed traditional transportation, making it more accessible for getting to work and accessing grocery stores and healthcare providers, which are essential to physical and mental well-being. However, such technologies are not available everywhere. Additionally, there is a scarcity of HCI work that investigates how vulnerable populations such as rural-dwelling people with HIV face and overcome transportation barriers. To extend past research, we conducted 31 surveys and 18 interviews with people living with HIV (22 surveys, 14 interviews) and their case coordinators (9 surveys, 4 interviews) in rural areas. Contrary to past research, we found that the use of alternative vehicles, extensive support networks, and nonprofit health organizations facilitated transportation. However, distance, the lack of trust and infrastructure, stigma, and other cultural underpinnings made popular forms of urban transportation unappealing. We contextualize our findings with prior research and contribute implications for future research and design.2021JMJuan F. Maestre et al.Indiana University BloomingtonPublic Transit & Trip PlanningCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Eliciting Tech Futures Among Black Young Adults: A Case Study of Remote Speculative Co-DesignThe question of who gets to contribute to design futures and technology innovation has become a topic of conversation across HCI, CSCW, and other computing communities. This conversation has grave implications for communities that often find themselves an afterthought in technology design, and who coincidentally could benefit most from technological interventions in response to societal oppression. To explore this topic, we examined `futuring' through co-designed speculative design fictions as methods to envision utopian and dystopian futures. In a case study, we examined technology's role in the imagined futures of youth participants of a Chicago summer design program. We highlight emerging themes and contribute an analysis of remote co-design through an Afrofuturism lens. Our analysis shows that concepts of utopian futures and technologies to support those futures are still heavily laden with dystopian realities of racism and poverty. We discuss ways that speculative design fictions and futuring may serve to address inclusivity in concept generation for new technologies and provide recommendations for conducting design techniques remotely with historically excluded populations.2021CHChristina Harrington et al.DePaul UniversityGender & Race Issues in HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsParticipatory DesignCHI
Uncovering the Promises and Challenges of Social Media Use in the Low-Wage Labor Market: Insights from EmployersSocial 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.2021ALAlex Jiahong Lu et al.University of MichiganSTEM Education & Science CommunicationSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorCommunity Engagement & Civic TechnologyCHI