Collaborative Research: HCC: Designing Technologies for Marginalized Communities

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This award supports research that examines the experiences of marginalized community members who are going through significant life changes. It focuses on how augmented reality can address social and behavioral factors underlying such changes. The project designs, builds, and evaluates technologies to address these challenges by including marginalized community members as partners in each stage of the project. It is expected to improve society more broadly by increasing equity and inclusion in the public sphere by advancing (1) understanding of how technologies represent and distort individual identities; (2) the impact of these technologies on people’s physical, mental, and economic well-being; and (3) methods for and examples of technology designs that are more equitable and inclusive. It also provides research training for underrepresented students. The results of this research will be of interest to policy makers, educators, and the general public. This research increases scientific knowledge in Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing about how technology can contribute to addressing challenges faced by people who are traditionally left out of design processes. The interdisciplinary team of researchers uses participatory design and qualitative research to study, build, and evaluate technologies to support marginalized communities. This research is expected to yield the following outcomes: 1) a comprehensive framework describing current gaps in technological innovation for people experiencing a significant life change; 2) design recommendations for how technology can address the needs and challenges of marginalized individuals; 3) innovative, human-centered augmented reality prototypes and techniques for supporting subcommunities in society; and 4) guidelines and heuristics for inclusive augmented reality. This is expected lead to potentially transformative theoretical and practical insights that extend Human-Computer Interaction research; it will do so by incorporating what we learn via technology designed with and for people who are not traditionally part of design processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.