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Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole.--- Sheena Erete, Editor

 

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. 

The importance of considering local context and partnering with target users is well established in co-design. Less common is an examination of the adaptations needed when deploying the same co-design program across heterogenous settings to maximize program efficacy and equity. We report on our experience co-designing educational games with six culturally and socioeconomically diverse afterschool sites over two years, and insights from interviewing ten program administrators across all sites. We found that even within the same afterschool program network, site differences in organizational culture and resources impacted the effectiveness of co-design programs, the co-design output, and expectations for student engagement. We characterize our afterschool partners into different archetypes – Safe Havens, Recreation Centers, Homework Helpers, and STEM Enrichment Centers. We provide recommendations for conducting co-design at each archetype and reflect on strategies for increasing equitable partnerships between researchers and afterschool centers. 

Digital games featuring programmable agents are popular tools for teaching coding and computational thinking skills. However, today's games perpetuate an arguably obsolete relationship between programmable agents and human operators. Borrowing from the field of human-robotics interaction, we argue that collaborative robots, or cobots, are a better model for thinking about computational agents, working directly with humans rather than in place of or at arm's length from them. In this paper, we describe an initial design inquiry into the design of “cobot games”, programmable agent scenarios in which players program an in-game ally to assist them in accomplishing gameplay objectives. We detail three questions that emerged out of this exploration, our present thinking on them, and plans for deepening inquiry into cobot game design moving forward. 

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.