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Enacting Identities: Participatory Design as a Context for Youth to Reflect, Project, and Apply their Emerging Identities

Published: 12 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Participatory design is an essential design strategy for creating artifacts and experiences that reflect the voices of the population being designed for and with. The participatory design process can serve not only to research resulting artifacts but also as an empowering activity for those who participate. This paper explores how participatory design can serve as a context for young participants to enact and voice their emerging identities and reveals how different participatory design activities have unique affordances for supporting this identity enactment. Focusing on a group of 12 and 13-year-old African American girls, this paper presents a case study showing how participatory design activities served as venues for the girls to reflect characteristics of their current identities, project future identities, and apply aspects of their identities to shape materials for others. In doing so, we contribute a case study showing how participatory design allows participants to enact their identities, helping researchers gain insight into characteristics of those they are designing with and for. This paper advances our understanding of participatory design as a design approach for youth, especially as it relates to issues of broadening participation, identity, and equity.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IDC '19: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
    June 2019
    787 pages
    ISBN:9781450366908
    DOI:10.1145/3311927
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    Published: 12 June 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. Equity
    2. Feminism
    3. Identity
    4. Participatory Design
    5. STEM Education

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    June 12 - 15, 2019
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    • (2024)Reflecting on the Relational: Youth-Centered Approaches to Living with TechnologyCompanion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3678884.3682047(27-30)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
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