Co-design methods have involved older adults in the design process to fill the knowledge gap that younger adult designers might encounter when designing for an aging population. A focus of co-design means establishing equal and equitable relationships between users and designers. To understand the factors that contribute to equal collaborations between older adults and student designers, we conducted 12 co-design sessions with 16 older adults and 11 student designers. We examined their interactions by adapting a framework initially aimed to understand the child-adult design partnership. We also analyzed student designers' reflections to understand their experiences and learnings from designing with older adults. Our findings demonstrate that developing a design partnership is complex. The framework helped surface factors like sharing life experiences and role ownership that influenced balanced or unbalanced interactions. Through the student designers' reflections, we found that student designers identified challenges they encountered and the assumptions they had about the older adult population. We believe that immersing students in a co-design experience with older adults and leveraging reflection activities provides an educational and meaningful experience to the design students.
Why is the solution the end point to a problem? While many in HCI and design have examined the impulse to solve problems—the solutionist or techno-solutionist mindset—we examine the logic that binds the solution and the problem together as a pair. Focusing on the timely and consequential problem of systemic racial injustice, we think through the paradoxical possibility that the pairing of the problem and solution (so often treated as the default in design and HCI) perpetuates the very conditions we seek to improve. With Calvin Warren’s profound Afro-pessimism, we recognize how the tools used to solve structural inequities around Black life are constructed with inequities themselves. The problem-solution therefore is a dead end. We use this paradox as an invitation to rethink ongoing efforts to seek equity and justice more broadly, setting out a fragile but hopeful path for HCI and design.
Mobile banking applications have become a primary mode of sharing and managing fnancial resources. However, prior work has questioned its role in serving Black communities amid legacies of structural racial inequity. To investigate this critical topic, we conducted a 30-day diary study with 21 participants and an interview study with 15 participants, all Black American users of the mobile payment platform Cash App. We observed that addressing hurdles to fnancial inclusion requires the navigation of institutional distrust, banking barriers, and fnancial literacy disparities. Our fndings suggest that Black Americans persist and navigate contemporary fnancial systems through legacies of social and cultural capacities. We ofer grounded-truth considerations for the continued design of fn-tech that could have equitable impact among historically marginalized communities. Refecting on the tenor of fnancial services to lack empathy, we urge designers and scholars of fnancial technology to refect on their power to promote racial justice and fnancial inclusion.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Interaction design.
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