Speaker
Tawanna Dillahunt, PhD, University of Michigan School of Information

Abstract
Technologies increasingly shape how people find work, build skills, and access opportunity. While many of these systems are carefully designed, empirically evaluated, and widely deployed, in practice, they often fail to support those operating under real-world constraints such as time scarcity, limited resources, institutional barriers, and uneven access to social support.

In this talk, I draw on over a decade of research on employment and workforce technologies to examine why “good” systems fail in deployment. Drawing on interconnected studies conducted in partnership with nonprofit organizations and workforce agencies, I use field deployments, audit studies, and longitudinal community collaborations to show how common design assumptions break down in practice, leading to unequal outcomes and low adoption, even on widely used platforms.

I argue that addressing these failures requires expanding the system boundary to include forms of infrastructure that computing systems often overlook, such as trust, feedback loops, and human mediation. I introduce the Community Tech Workers program as a sociotechnical intervention that treats human support and local expertise as integral components of the system rather than as end users. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for the design and deployment of employment technologies intended to serve the public good, and considering the impact of developing systems for real-world constraints rather than idealized conditions.

Bio
Tawanna Dillahunt is a Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and an affiliate faculty member with the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program. She directs the Social Innovations Group (SIG), an interdisciplinary research team that designs and examines technologies operating under real-world constraints, particularly in contexts shaped by resource limitations, institutional barriers, and uneven access to opportunity, primarily in the United States.

Tawanna is a 2022–2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a 2023-2024 MIT Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and an inaugural Skip Ellis Early Career Award recipient. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the Oregon Health and Science University, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. Prior to academia, she worked as a software engineer in Intel Corporation’s Desktop Board and LAN Access Divisions.