Workplace mentorship is critical for career advancement, sense of belonging, and well-being. However, historically marginalized groups face barriers to effective mentorship including misaligned commitments, difficulty establishing comfort with mentors, and relationship persistence. We explore how 3D virtual environment (VE) counterspaces, or spaces that center the well-being of marginalized people, can circumnavigate these barriers and generate dedicated environments for workplace mentorship. We present Mentorship Garden: a digital counterspace designed to facilitate mentorship communication around commitments, goals, progress, and well-being. We deployed Mentorship Garden with 10 mentor-mentee pairs, recruited from DEI mentoring programs at a large global company, and interviewed them about their experiences. Overall, Mentorship Garden provided a relaxing space for participants to engage in rituals supporting historically marginalized individuals via mentorship, but revealed potential challenges in seamlessly integrating it in the workplace. We discuss design implications for creating virtual mentorship counterspaces in the workplace and opportunities for future research.

Technology, especially the smartphone, is villainized for taking meaning and time away from in-person interactions and secluding people into “digital bubbles”. We believe this is not an intrinsic property of digital gadgets, but evidence of a lack of imagination in technology design. Leveraging augmented reality (AR) toward this end allows us to create experiences for multiple people, their pets, and their environments. In this work, we explore the design of AR technology that “piggybacks” on everyday leisure to foster co-located interactions among close ties (with other people and pets). We designed, developed, and deployed three such AR applications, and evaluated them through a 41-participant and 19-pet user study. We gained key insights about the ability of AR to spur and enrich interaction in new channels, the importance of customization, and the challenges of designing for the physical aspects of AR devices (e.g., holding smartphones). These insights guide design implications for the novel research space of co-located AR.

The rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.

In this short paper, we share our experiences designing a game for and about students of color at predominantly white institutions as a case study for a BIPOC-centric game design process. Through our design process, we encountered tensions in game design. For example, the frequency and relative inconsequence of physically violent death harmfully emphasizing real-world trauma in a game where all the main characters are people of color. We also encountered exciting opportunities in how we might create game experiences truly centering people of color. For example, the surprisingly novel delight of designing and creating slice-of-life narrative scenes in which people of color interact and thrive. We share how we work through these tensions and opportunities in order to open a conversation around game design processes by and for people of color as ways to uplift ourselves and our communities.