Designing Civic Technology with Trust

As the role technology plays in relationships between people and their governments grows, developing a better understanding of how trust can inform designing civic technology with trust is urgent work for human computer-interaction researchers. This paper reports our efforts to design with trust through a two-year design-ethnography with the City of Atlanta Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. We developed a sociotechnical system—Code Enforcer—to help this office guide immigrant residents through successfully engaging the city's code enforcement process. To inform the design process, we adapted our framework of trust-as-distance. While the framework was instrumental for integrating issues of trust throughout our design process, it also introduced tensions between how and by whom trust was enacted and interpreted. By reflecting on these tensions, we tease out the political and moral elements of designing with trust vital for HCI to navigate moving forward.