Alex Jiahong Lu

Bureaucratic complexities play a critical role in shaping the data-driven governance of urban spaces and citizens. Drawing on an ethnographic project in Shanghai, this paper attends to the construction and practical operation of a centralized data infrastructure as part of the city’s smart city initiative, which sought to streamline collaboration across bureaucratic silos within the governance structure. By showing the friction in the production and citation of centralized governance data across otherwise fragmented silos, we unpack how these data embody decision-making hierarchies and administrative boundaries. To enact intra- and inter-silo coordination, frontline bureaucratic workers have to take on new forms of what we call bureaucratic data work to carry out practical governance tasks in particular governance scenarios. As such, smart city infrastructures become intertwined with existing silos, thereby reproducing bureaucratic orders and inefficiencies. We argue that data-drivenness itself paradoxically becomes both the driving force and the structural impasse in reproducing siloed governance and the untenable technocratic imaginaries embedded in smart cities.

This paper positions Black senses of place and the labor of placemaking as central to speculative design practice. We foreground the social, cultural, and historical specificities of place as experienced by Black communities long subjected to racial violence. Drawing from a participatory speculative design project with seniors and youth in Detroit, we show how visions of sociotechnical alternatives emerged from community members’ situated experiences of their neighborhoods and place-based cultural practices. We argue that speculative design must engage placemaking to confront three interrelated forms of nowhereness, namely the rendering of Black life as placeless within racialized spatial orders, the erasure of Black futures through dominant technocratic futurity, and speculation itself operating from and for nowhere, detached from place and accountability. We conceptualize and advocate for a shift from nowhere to now-here within speculative design, offering practical implications for grounding futurity in lived places, relational labor, and Black livingness. This reorients speculative design toward a place-based practice that centers the agency of impacted communities in imagining and enacting sociotechnical worlds otherwise.

This paper examines how informal care work in community-based aging systems is assetized through the institutionalization of timebanking. Drawing on long-term ethnography following the implementation of digital timebanking systems as part of government-led aging-in-community initiatives in Shanghai, this paper teases out the labor of navigating multi-layered temporal tensions in informal caregiving, from interactional to personal to generational. We demonstrate how present informal care work has been transformed into exchangeable, bankable, and quantifiable assets, promising future social and economic benefits. We analyze how timebanking assetizes, institutionalizes, and governs informal care work by mobilizing younger generations of older adults (i.e., those recently retired) to perform unpaid caregiving for older generations in the communities under the rhetoric of mutual support and uncertain promises of future care. We discuss how CSCW can critically engage with the temporal navigations that are integral to informal care work, particularly in the context of demographic shifts, labor shortages, and the broken formal aging care infrastructure. From there, we question whether timebanking constitutes a sustainable sociotechnical alternative to formal care systems, or if it is increasingly co-opted for labor extraction that reproduces the precarity of aging futures.

This paper reconsiders knowledge sharing as a relational process of disorientation and reorientation, which is a way of turning toward others, the world, and possible futures. Drawing on an intergenerational participatory speculative design project in a historically Black neighborhood, we show how seniors and youth shared knowledge of turning toward the affective, more-than-human relations, as well as toward one another and collective futures. These practices reoriented participants across differences toward one another and their community, cultivating new cross-generational relationships and shared imagination. Building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation and Black feminist thought, we argue that knowledge sharing is less about efficiency or productivity and more about relational alignment—negotiating how communities come together and move together toward otherwise futures. For HCI, this critical reframing foregrounds the racialized histories and everyday labors that sustain collective orientations, urging scholars and designers to consider how communities can collectively (re)orient themselves epistemically and ontologically through design, and what otherwise worlds those reorientations make possible.

U.S. public housing is historically a site of racialized and carceral surveillance. Digital surveillance technologies reinforce this containment by mediating carceral visuality, the institutionalized visual and analytic lenses that shape perceptions and governance of public housing spaces and residents. This paper presents a videovoice project with a public housing community, for which residents used smartphones to capture their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries in relation to surveillance. We analyze how these video artifacts enact alternative ways of seeing and knowing, surfacing overlooked routines, relations, and critiques of surveillance. These videos document what is often invisibilized: the lived consequences of carceral visuality and the situated knowledge of those surveilled. We propose “counter-visual artifacts” to describe the political and disruptive role these videos play in challenging dominant visual regimes and reclaiming the right to see and be seen otherwise. By advocating for counter-visual sensibilities, we invite HCI scholars to rethink how artifacts make room for alternative ways of seeing.

Storyboarding is a key method in design research and practice, widely used for ideation, communication, and critique of design prototypes. This article repositions storyboards as critical design artifacts with discursive and material power that mediates expertise and imaginaries of design futures. Drawing from a case study of a participatory speculative design project with Black older adults and youth, I advocate for a participatory turn in storyboarding, demonstrating how it can serve as a generative space for storytelling, collaboration, and learning. By asking how we might redistribute the power to storyboard, I argue that participatory storyboarding opens up new possibilities for rethinking the epistemic, representational, and performative stakes of this practice. I conclude with practical implications for human-computer interaction design research and user experience education, calling for approaching storyboarding as a relational, political, and situated method that can challenge dominant narratives of technology design and expertise.