This article highlights the role of place in understanding problems, specifically within community-engaged projects in upper-level technical and professional communication courses. Drawing on a year-long participant-generated imagery study with students, instructors, and community partners, the authors argue that photographic research is effective in helping participants and researchers tune to place. Taking photos offers opportunities for documentation, individual interpretation, and collaborative reflection, resulting in a deeper, more nuanced sense of place. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how a greater awareness of place, cultivated through reflecting on visual evidence, enhances engagement projects and helps technical communicators address complex problems.

Design-thinking frameworks help professionals to design solutions for complex problems. Design processes take into account the context of a problem, and among these contextual factors is place. Because place is relational, capturing dynamic relationships between other factors of design problems, it deserves special attention from stakeholders trying to tackle wicked problems. This literature review elaborates on the relationship between place and design thinking, focusing on the importance of privileging place in user-centered design processes.