As artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly integrated into healthcare, ensuring that this innovation helps to combat health inequities requires engaging marginalized communities in health AI futuring. However, little research has examined Black populations’ perspectives on the use of AI in health contexts, despite the widespread health inequities they experience–inequities that are already perpetuated by AI. Addressing this research gap, through qualitative workshops with 18 Black adults, we characterize participants’ cautious optimism for health AI addressing structural well-being barriers (e.g., by providing second opinions that introduce fairness into an unjust healthcare system), and their concerns that AI will worsen health inequities (e.g., through health AI biases they deemed inevitable and the problematic reality of having to trust healthcare providers to use AI equitably). We advance health AI research by articulating previously-unreported health AI perspectives from a population experiencing significant health inequities, and presenting key considerations for future work.

HCI research to date has only scratched the surface of the unique approaches racially minoritized communities take to building, designing, and using technology systems. While there has been an increase in understanding how people across racial groups create community across different platforms, there is still a lack of studies that explicitly center on how Black technologists design with and for their own communities. In this paper, we present findings from a series of semi-structured interviews with Black technologists who have used, created, or curated resources to support lived Black experiences. From their experiences, we find a multifaceted approach to design as a means of survival, to stay connected, for cultural significance, and to bask in celebratory joy. Further, we provide considerations that emphasize the need for centering lived Black experiences in design and share approaches that can empower the broader research community to conduct further inquiries into design focused on those in the margins.

Design activism is a way for designers and researchers to negotiate societal inequities and resulting implications for design practices. Within HCI and design, community-based methods are a common way to situate design engagements among those directly impacted by social inequities. Despite its potential for social impact, current approaches to design activism can be extractive and at odds with community-aligned advocacy. Drawing on interviews with 32 individuals who use design to address local, social inequities, we extend the current discourse around design activism by exploring 'activist-led design'. We outline four key considerations of this work: understanding activist-led design practices; relationality and community engagements; challenges of doing this work; and democratizing access to design. Our analysis highlights implications for academia's role in design activism. This paper interrogates design activism's role as a social and communal practice, and considers ways to support activist-led design. We propose considerations that contribute to the larger conversation of academic design having more equitable impact.

Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. Frameworks such as assets-based design and designing for resilience have emerged to highlight the strengths of these communities. However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity, such as joy, pleasure, rest, and cultural heritage, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this paper, we present three case studies of existing technologies that center BIPOC flourishing to provide an alternative path for HCI. We propose six actionable tenets for designing for flourishing in the everyday: (1) seek opportunities to design for self-actualization, (2) identify and center the desire to flourish, (3) collaborate and distribute power, (4) refrain from damage-centered reductionism, (5) bring the humanity of a community into the design process, (6) and evaluate for self-sustainability.

Examinations of intersectionality and identity dimensions in accessibility research have primarily considered disability separately from a person’s race and ethnicity. Accessibility work often does not include considerations of race as a construct, or treats race as a shallow demographic variable, if race is mentioned at all. The lack of attention to race as a construct in accessibility research presents an oversight in our field, often systematically eliminating whole areas of need and vital perspectives from the work we do. Further, there has been little focus on the intersection of race and disability within accessibility research, and the relevance of their interplay. When research in race or disability does not mention the other, this work overlooks the potential to better understand the full nuance of marginalized and “otherized” groups. To address this gap, we present a series of case studies exploring the potential for research that lies at the intersection of race and disability. We provide examples of how to integrate racial equity perspectives into accessibility research, through positive examples found in these case studies and reflect on teaching at the intersection of race, disability, and technology. This paper highlights the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies, designs of socio-technical systems, and education. Our analysis provides recommendations towards establishing this research direction.

Conversational agents such as chatbots have emerged as a useful resource to access real-time health information online. Perceptions of trust and credibility among chatbots have been attributed to the anthropomorphism and humanness of the chatbot design, with gender and race influencing their reception. Few existing studies have looked specifically at the diversity of chatbot avatar design related to both race, age, and gender, which may have particular significance for racially minoritized users like Black older adults. In this paper, we explored perceptions of chatbots with varying identities for health information seeking in a diary and interview study with 30 Black older adults. Our findings suggest that while racial and age likeness influence feelings of trust and comfort with chatbots, constructs such as professionalism and likeability and overall familiarity also influence reception. Based on these findings, we provide implications for designing text-based chatbots that consider Black older adults.

Ethnic community-based organizations (CBOs) play an essential role in supporting the wellbeing of immigrants and refugees. CBO workers often act as linguistic and cultural translators between communities, government, and health and social service systems. However, resource constraints, technological barriers, and pressures to be data-driven require workers to perform additional forms of translation to ensure their organizations’ survival. Drawing on 16 interviews with members of 7 Asian American and Pacific Islander CBOs, we examine opportunities and barriers concerning their technology-mediated work practices. We identify two circumstances where CBO workers perform translation: (1) as legitimacy work to build trust with funders and communities, and (2) as (re)mediation in attending to technological barriers and resisting hegemonic systems that treat their communities as “other.” By unpacking the politics of translation work across these sites, we position CBO workers as a critical source for HCI research and practice as it seeks to support community wellbeing.

Researchers support race, gender, and age diverse groups of people to create with maker electronics. These groups include older adults, who are often overlooked as not interested or capable of learning new technologies due to ageist stereotypes. One approach, often involving e-textiles, leverages crafting as a bridge to broaden participation in making. We investigated ways to broaden participation in maker electronics for older adults by remotely co-designing e-textile projects with 6 older adult crafters over the course of 5 workshop sessions for a total of 45 hours. We developed a deeper understanding of their practices, identifying a Planner-Improviser Spectrum for how they approached their craft, and created medium fidelity prototypes. Our design implications draw on our participants’ crafting experience and their experience in the workshop to highlight what e-textile toolkit designers can learn from skilled older adult crafters, such as selecting familiar materials, supporting aesthetic goals, and making electronics more attainable.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States demanded police reform and legislative action. Data-driven policing is just one technological intervention designed with the hope to tackle police brutality. However, these design interventions are often rooted in the continued racial profiling of poor and socially marginalized communities. Designers and researchers need a Healing Justice framework to circumvent this harm. Healing Justice addresses generational trauma and violence in marginalized communities and is not just a framework for policing but can address maternal mortality rates, COVID-19, medical malpractice, and other trauma issues. In this paper, we apply a Healing Justice framework to co-design activities focused on police brutality. We bridge Healing Justice and design by using an Afrofuturist Feminism framework, arguing that Healing Justice and Afrofuturist feminism frameworks lead to collective, grassroots, and pragmatic designs.

When considering the democratic intentions of co-design, designers and design researchers must evaluate the impact of power imbalances embedded in common design and research dynamics. This holds particularly true in work with and for marginalized communities, who are frequently excluded in design processes. To address this issue, we examine how existing design tools and methods are used to support communities in processes of community building or reimagining, considering the influence of race and identity. This paper describes our findings from 27 interviews with community design practitioners conducted to evaluate the Building Utopia toolkit, which employs an Afrofuturist lens for speculative design processes. Our research findings support the importance of design tools that prompt conversations on race in design, and tensions between the desire for imaginative design practice and the immediacy of social issues, particularly when designing with Black and brown communities.

Black older adults from lower socioeconomic environments are often neglected in health technology interventions. Voice assistants have a potential to make healthcare more accessible to older adults, yet, little is known about their experiences with this type of health information seeking, especially Black older adults. Through a three-phase exploratory study, we explored health information seeking with 30 Black older adults in lower-income environments to understand how they ask health-related questions, and their perceptions of the Google Home being used for that purpose. Through our analysis, we identified the health information needs and common search topics, and discussed the communication breakdowns and types of repair performed. We contribute an understanding of cultural code-switching that has to be done by these older adults when interacting with voice assistants, and the importance of such phenomenon when designing for historically excluded groups.

Traditional approaches to technology design have historically ignored Blackness in both who engages and conceptualizes future technologies. Design contributions of groups marginalized along race and class are often othered, and rarely considered the design standard. While frameworks have emerged to encourage attention to gender and social justice in design, little work has acknowledged evidence of the Black imaginary in this process. The current canon of design defines futuring and speculation as stemming from a narrow view of science fiction, one which does not include Black futurist perspectives. In this essay, we expand the canon of design by arguing that frameworks such as Afrofuturism, Afrofuturist feminism, and Black feminism be considered instrumental in design’s imagining of our future technological landscape. We contribute to the larger conversation of who gets to future in design, suggesting a dialogic relationship between those who conceptualize design and those who consider design’s societal impact.

Innovations in HCI research of health-related pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can potentially improve older adults’ access to healthcare resources and support long-term independence in the home. Despite efforts to include their voices in technology research and design, many older adults have yet to actualize these health benefits, with barriers of access and proficiency actually widening the gap of health inequities. We reviewed 174 HCI publications through a systematic review to examine who is engaged in the design of health technologies for older adults, methods used to engage them, and how different types of participation might impact design directions. Findings highlight that thus far, many identity dimensions have not been explored in HCI aging research. We identify research gaps and implications to promote expanding research engagement with these dimensions as a way to support the design of health technologies that see better adoption among marginalized populations.

Participatory design is positioned as an approach to address community challenges and reimagine potential futures by decentralizing systems of power and centering the marginalized, moving away from designers as experts and framing design as being community-driven. Methods of speculative participatory design are useful in imagining futures among marginalized groups while negotiating existing societal constructs. While research probes have been developed to support the practice of speculation in design, we have yet to see research probes in HCI that consider the lived experiences of Black and brown communities. In this pictorial, we illustrate the process of developing methods cards as design probes to encourage speculative and critical design thinking from an Afrofuturism lens. We highlight how Afrofuturism centers Black communities in design speculation lending to both equity-driven design outcomes, and an accessible resource that can be readily used by designers and non- designers alike in addressing community concerns.

The question of who gets to contribute to design futures and technology innovation has become a topic of conversation across HCI, CSCW, and other computing communities. This conversation has grave implications for communities that often find themselves an afterthought in technology design, and who coincidentally could benefit most from technological interventions in response to societal oppression. To explore this topic, we examined “futuring” through co-designed speculative design fictions as methods to envision utopian and dystopian futures. In a case study, we examined technology’s role in the imagined futures of youth participants of a Chicago summer design program. We highlight emerging themes and contribute an analysis of remote co-design through an Afrofuturism lens. Our analysis shows that concepts of utopian futures and technologies to support those futures are still heavily laden with dystopian realities of racism and poverty. We discuss ways that speculative design fictions and futuring can serve to address inclusivity in concept generation for new technologies, and we provide recommendations for conducting design techniques remotely with historically excluded populations.

Computer Science outreach programs for Black and Latinx communities are often led by those who are not of the community for which they are building. While there are programs that exist that are being ran by Black and Latinx men and women, they are often conducted in siloes and are not given the resources that other programs are given. This session will serve as a gathering for Black and Latinx BPC program leaders to share resources that could help with operations, funding, and collaboration amongst themselves and other external stakeholders.

Community-based approaches to participatory design, such as the design workshop, promise to engage underserved populations in collaborative dialog and provide a platform for promoting the views of communities who are not typically given a space to engage in design. Yet, we know little about how design workshops as a research site can engage underserved individuals (i.e., due to class, race, or age status) or address personal concerns (e.g., health). As a way of exploring these issues, we conducted a series of five design workshops with low-income African-American older adults to understand their health experiences. Our findings reveal three insights associated with the design workshop and the topic of health: comfort with community versus personal health; the sociocultural configuration of interaction; and empowerment in the context of systematic inequality of opportunity. We discuss the importance of understanding the situated nature of design workshops, particularly when engaging underserved groups in the topic of health, and the potential of the design workshop as a mechanism for activism.

Participatory Design (PD) is envisioned as an approach to democratizing innovation in the design process by shifting the power dynamics between researcher and participant. Recent scholarship in HCI and design has analyzed the ways collaborative design engagements, such as PD situated in the design workshop can amplify voices and empower underserved populations. Yet, we argue that PD as instantiated in the design workshop is very much an affluent and privileged activity that often neglects the challenges associated with envisioning equitable design solutions among underserved populations. Based on two series of community-based PD workshops with underserved populations in the U.S., we highlight key areas of tension and considerations for a more equitable PD approach: historical context of the research environment, community access, perceptions of materials and activities, and unintentional harm in collecting full accounts of personal narratives. By reflecting on these tensions as a call-to-action, we hope to deconstruct the privilege of the PD workshop within HCI and re-center the focus of design on individuals who are historically underserved.