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This paper presents findings from an empirical study that uncovers the economic, psychological, and socio-cultural adaptation strategies used by recent Afghan refugees in a midwestern U.S. state. Through 14 semi-structured interviews conducted between February and April 2023, this study investigates how Afghan refugees utilize technology, tools, and skills in their resettlement process, and builds upon Hsiao et al.'s conceptualization of sociotechnical adaptation. The findings reveal (i) gender and collectivist cultural values play a big role in determining the types of adaptation strategies used by men versus women, (ii) strategic choices in terms of the type of support sought depending on shared versus non-shared identity of host community members, (iii) a notable tension between economic adaptation and preserving socio-cultural values is observed, and (iv) creative, collective solutions by women participants to address economic challenges, contributing to the discourse on solidarity economies in HCI. Key contributions include (a) design implications for technological products that can aid in psychological adaptation, fostering solidarity economies, and creating digital safe spaces for refugees to connect with shared-identity host populations, and (b) policy and program recommendations for refugee resettlement agencies to enhance digital literacy among refugees. 

Participatory Design scholars and practitioners have embraced speculative design approaches to challenge normative assumptions about sociotechnical futures and address the systemic lack of racial and class diversity in futuring. This paper draws upon a community-based participatory speculative design (PSD) project conducted with a group of working-class Detroiters, focusing on speculating about alternative community economies. We illustrate how PSD served as a process of ongoing “contamination” where the boundaries of community members’ visions of desired futures are opened up, troubled, and negotiated on the individual, alliance, and collective levels, thus forming new commons for collaboration and resistance across differences. For them, such contamination was a reflexive process aimed at identifying whose visions were excluded from their own and how community-held sociotechnical imaginary could emerge through collaboration. We argue that foregrounding contamination in PSD makes meaningful space for fostering reflexivity in knowledge production, while destabilizing and reassembling more inclusive sociotechnical futures. 

In Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the United States, municipal authorities have deployed an array of surveillance technologies with the promise of containing crime and improving community safety. This article draws from a cross-sectional survey of over two thousand Detroit residents and multi-year community-based fieldwork in Detroit’s Eastside to examine local perceptions of policing surveillance technologies. Our survey reveals that respondents, notably those in more vulnerable positions, report higher perceived safety levels with policing surveillance cameras in their neighborhoods. However, when triangulating these results with insights from our fieldwork, we argue that these survey findings should not be taken as public support for surveillance. Alongside this seeming buy-in is a widely shared “better than nothing” imaginary among residents from impacted communities. “Better than nothing,” for the residents, is a pragmatic compromise and maneuver between being aware of the inherent flaws of surveillance technologies and settling for any available resource or hope. This notion of “better than nothing” unveils residents’ prolonged wait for digital justice and institutional accountability, which we show is where racialized infrastructural harm and exploitation are enacted along the temporal dimension. Our findings offer practical insights for counter-surveillance advocacy efforts. 

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. 

Participatory action research (PAR) approaches center community members’ lived experiences and can spur positive change around pressing challenges faced by communities. Even though PAR and similar approaches have been increasingly adopted in HCI research that focuses on social justice and community empowerment, public-facing events that are based on this research and center community members’ voices are less common. This case study sheds light on how to initiate and organize events that build on existing PAR efforts, and what practical challenges might exist in this process. Building on a photovoice research project, we—a collaborative team of university researchers and staff members of a community organization in Eastside Detroit—co-organized a community-based public-facing exhibition that featured community members’ photographic narratives of personal and communal safety and surveillance. In this case study, we reflect on the challenges we experienced in planning and holding the exhibition. We contribute a set of practical guidelines to help researchers facilitate community-based events when conducting participatory action research in HCI. 

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.