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Community-based afterschool programs are valuable spaces for researchers to codesign technologies with direct relevance to local communities. However, afterschool programs differ in resources available, culture, and student demographics in ways that may impact the efficacy of the codesign process and outcome. We ran a series of multi-week educational game codesign workshops across five programs over twenty weeks and found notable differences, despite deploying the same protocol. Our findings characterize three types of programs: Safe Havens, Recreation Centers, and Homework Helpers. We note major differences in students' patterns of participation directly influenced by each program's culture and expectations for equitable partnerships and introduce Comparative Design-Based Research (cDBR) as a beneficial lens for codesign.
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Negotiating Systemic Racial and Gender Bias as a Minoritized Adult Design Researcher
Fostering equal design partnerships in adult-child codesign interactions is a well-documented challenge in HCI. It is assumed that adults come into these interactions with power and have to make adjustments to allow childrens’ input to be equally valued. However, power is not a unilateral construct - it is in part determined by social and cultural norms that often disadvantage minoritized groups. Striving for equal partnership without centering users’ and participants’ intersectional identities may lead to unproductive adult-child codesign interactions. We codesigned a game, primarily facilitated by a black woman researcher, with K-5 afterschool programs comprised of students from three different communities – a middle-class, racially diverse community; a low-income, primarily African American community; and a working-class rural, white, community over a period of 20 weeks. We share preliminary insights on how racial and gender biases affect codesign partnerships and describe future research plans to modify our program structure to foster more effective adult-child interactions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1906753
- PAR ID:
- 10340226
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI PLAY '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 203 to 208
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3450337.3483479
