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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. 

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. 

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. 

Past Information and Communication Technology (ICT) literature suggests that engaging in meaningful activities with ICTs may be related to socio-economic security, social inclusion, empowerment, and increased social capital. However, we identify a pervasive lack of understanding in existing literature, which raises an important research question: how can we build social capital where little social capital exists? We conducted a preliminary study to explore whether and if so, how, individuals in an economically distressed population with limited social capital use technologies to increase social capital and achieve socio-economic security. We contribute details about barriers affecting social capital (e.g., difficulties finding and making the right connections and an overall lack of trust within communities). We also suggest ways in which ICTs can assist populations that could benefit most from increased social capital and economic security.