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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. 

Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.