HCC: Medium: Organizational Resilience Making with Technology

Organizations that support those who are vulnerable, such as migrants fleeing war zones or veterans who return home after serving during war time, operate under chronic duress and uncertainty. Computing technologies and data are increasingly important to how these organizations provide services, but little is known about how these organizations build data and technological capacity in the face of severe constraints—they generally have limited resources, experience high demand for their services, and need to adapt to changing needs and conditions.

This project is designed to understand how organizations use technology to increase their resilience, which will yield key insights into how technological solutions might be designed to further promote resilience not just for human service organizations, but other organizations with similar constraints and needs.

This project will contribute empirical insights and design implications to better support the sociotechnical infrastructure work of organizations serving refugee communities. The research team will conduct interviews and focus groups with a number of such organizations, including ones created by and for refugees. Through these, the research team will develop models describing the range of strategies that these organizations are using to be resilient in their technology use and how they draw on data and information technology as part of their everyday work.

These results will be used to inform a second phase of design-focused research that includes both organizations that respond to refugee needs and refugees themselves, centered around participatory design sessions aimed at envisioning possible futures. The outcomes of these sessions will encourage community members to envision a more technically robust future, yield implications for both future design possibilities and practice, and pose novel research questions around organizational resilience in the face of constraints.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.