Hi everyone i'm Alexandra To, and today i'm presenting "Reducing Uncertainty and
Offering Comfort: Designing Technology for Coping with Interpersonal Racism."
This is a participatory design study that uses interactive fiction to
facilitate conversation and generative ideation around racism and technology.
This study is a part of the larger CARE project which stands for Coping After Racist Experiences.
So i do want to provide that content warning that the project deals with racism
and it looks at how we might design technology that prioritizes the
well-being and coping of individuals who deal with racism on a regular basis.
As larger context in the project we use critical race theory which tells us that racism
is an ordinary everyday occurrence, and even though modern racism can be
subtle and even unintended experiencing racism on a regular basis is incredibly harmful to
mental emotional and physical well-being.
we identified some specific challenges that HCI and design might address in this space.
Namely that social support seeking is one of the best ways of coping with interpersonal racism,
because it allows for connection and meaning making.
However people of color justifiably do not feel
that popularly available tools for connection are made for them.
Often the risk is too high or the labor involved is too great to seek that necessary support.
So this informs an agenda for participatory design that can center the needs of people of color.
We ran six workshops with 26 people who identified as having experienced racism.
And before joining us in the workshop we asked participants to read through
an interactive fiction in a vignette study as a primer for our design space.
Interactive fiction vignette studies are extraordinarily powerful for helping us
understand how people respond emotionally to socially complex and sensitive situations,
while also providing quite a bit of agency in how a person might interact with the story.
So we developed this interactive vignette in Twine and in the narrative we wrote you
take on the role of Sam, a college student who experiences a racial microaggression.
In the narrative vignette you get to make choices about what Sam says feels and does.
And at a research lab networking event
in the story, a visiting professor says three back-to-back racial microaggressions to Sam.
After completing the story at home on their own,
participants answer some survey questions interpreting the experience and then later
join us in the lab in groups to engage in a co-design workshop.
In the workshop participants, who are often strangers, work together to
recall the narrative and reconstruct it together.
They analyze it for needs, pain points, and opportunities
and they role play some scenarios where they might want to seek social support in similar situations.
They storyboard and develop ideas for technologies
that might better support themselves or Sam in similar situations in the future.
And the method we developed here using interactive fiction embodies values of
community-based participatory research.
We prioritize the comfort and safety of our participants, center their insights
and experiences, and position them as collaborators and experts in this work.
Safety mechanisms were a really important part of
this and a big part of the paper and you can read more about that there.
In the end participants produced a wide range of
interesting technologies, both near and far future.
There's a few on the screen including a smartwatch button for racism, an augmented reality device
that allows you to see a person's history of making racist remarks, and a smart speaker that's
a little friend that reassures you and helps you talk about your experiences with racism.
We conducted a thematic analysis of participants recall of the story,
their own analysis of it, and their design proposals.
And this ultimately produced, among other things,
themes for technology that might prioritize coping with racism.
And these themes reveal that our participants have
complicated relationships with the ways that technology specifically can support them.
The paper presents new methods for helping facilitate conversations
and speculative design around sensitive subjects.
And in the workshop participants
also shared complex and sophisticated understandings of modern technology.
Finally the paper produces considerations in
designing technology that empowers coping with interpersonal racism.
However it's important to note that the design
fictions proposed here are not solutions to be implemented.
They are what is known as naive fragile fictions.
So the work is more in the vein of research through design - this
helps us uncover characteristics of socio-technical tools for support,
rather than generating immediately viable design ideas.
And in our future work we synthesized and evaluated these ideas in context.
This work is supported by a great number of student research assistants,
colleagues, and mentors.
And you can find more detail about the designs
in our participants own words as well as our methods in the paper.