In line with the shift toward dementia-friendly communities, HCI research is increasingly exploring holistic ways to support people living with dementia as active community members. However, less is known about how existing community networks influence technology design and effectiveness. This paper analyses Community-Based Participatory Design (CBPD) workshops conducted with individuals living with dementia, their spouses, and program coordinators through Wenger’s Communities of Practice Framework. We demonstrate how participants’ interactions created a community of practice through their: engagement in creating mutual meaning, alignment around a common purpose, and imagination in envisioning new possibilities for inclusion. Our findings highlight the agency of participants as they worked to create inclusive experiences for themselves and others. Our findings additionally demonstrated how community boundaries create systemic barriers that lead to non-participation. We argue Wenger’s framework offers a roadmap for designing technologies that foster person-to-person interdependence, helping to build more genuinely inclusive communities.

Researchers urge technology practitioners such as data scientists to consider the impacts and ethical implications of algorithmic decisions. However, unlike programming, statistics, and data management, discussion of ethical implications is rarely included in standard data science training. To begin to address this gap, we designed and tested a toolbox called the data ethics emergency drill (DEED) to help data science teams discuss and reflect on the ethical implications of their work. The DEED is a roleplay of a fictional ethical emergency scenario that is contextually situated in the team’s specific workplace and applications. This paper outlines the DEED toolbox and describes three studies carried out with two different data science teams that iteratively shaped its design. Our findings show that practitioners can apply lessons learnt from the roleplay to real-life situations, and how the DEED opened up conversations around ethics and values.