Playful Learning Landscapes companion mobile app
Roles: UX researcher, qualitative data analyst, project manager.
Tasks: I participate in co-design sessions, usability testing, and created coding schemes from audio and drawings and transform them into cultrually sustaining design assets, direction, and feedback for the app design.
I also co-led effort to track, manage, and coordinate final design and execution of five different physical installations in parks, grocery stores, and bus stops with stakeholders: City of Santa Ana, UC Irvine researchers, designers, artists, contractors, and community.
Methods: Participatory design, participant observation, qualitative data analysis (coding, thematic)
Institution(s): UCI + Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI)
Stakeholders: SAELI, Santa Ana local government, parents and members of the Santa Ana community, HCI/educators, NSF
Challenges:
How can we expand access to our activities for youth who cannot go to the physical instalations in a way that sustains and reflect deep community's values?
How can we expand the proposed physical installations to provide a larger variety of activities and provide replayability?
How can we balance stakeholder intersts and strive for equitable relationship in a situation of power differentials while building the installations?
Description
This project is an extension of a larger initiative, Playful Learning Landscapes, which reimagines public spaces as hubs for learning STEM through play.
Using community-based, participatory design research and partnering with local community members from the Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI),
we are co-designing a cellphone application that allows children to interact further with the physical installations - both in-situ and online, not only providing
further engagement for youth who complete the activities in-person, but also
making our activities accessible for children who cannot visit the installations.
Right now, we are creating prototypes that reflect children's values, and the communtiy's ways of knowing and being. We're looking forward to testing the prototypes with the families soon!
-- More coming soon!-- Funded by NSF and Heisings-Simmons
Youth Connections for Wellbeing
Role: Researcher, Faciliator, Curriculum co-creator and Design instructor
Tasks: I co-designed the structure of the program, the curriculum, and co-faciliated the sessions where we taught and co-designed alongside Latine youth. I also co-created the interview protocol and executed interviews.
Methods: Participatory design, semi-strucured interviews, participant observation, culturally sustaining pedagogy, counterstory, qualitative data analysis
Institution(s): UCI + Listo America Clubhouse
Stakeholders: HCI reserachers and educators, Latine clubhouse, 11 youth, Pivotal Ventures
Challenge: Explore Latine's youth intersectional relationships between wellness and technology. What would a tool/idea that is tailored for their wellness and context look like?
Description
Youth Connections for Wellbeing is a multi-stage project that explores youth's insights, agency, and technology engagements to support their wellbeing.
Our stage focused on a participatory design project oriented towards teen digital wellness
The curriculum is based on concepts of cultural responsiveness and community based design, and covered topics such as technology design techniques,
wellness, and cognitive behavioral principles.
We worked and learned with Latinx teenagers, ages 11-22, co-designing tools for wellness
using methods such as "design from within" (Anderson-Coto* & O'leary*, 2021), counter storytelling, and culturally susatining design.
Outcomes:
By the end of the program, the youth organized in groups, developed, and presented four designs of wellness tools, combining digital and non-digital elements that
centered on their own experiences and perceptions of wellbeing. Common threads throughout these designs such as
community, inclusion, and unique challenges faced by Latinx youth that gave us insight about their views on wellness and technology.
Part of the way through our program, Covid-19 forced us to our work from in-person to an online format.
This presented challenges, opportunities, and lessons for researchers on how to mantain participant engagement and a feeling of community, which we will address in upcoming work.
Funded by Pivotal Ventures
Tenacity
Role: UX Researcher, facilitator, and qualitative data analysis.
Tasks: I coordinated a team of 8 graduate students and design interns. I co-designed and executed the interview porotocol, diary study, and surveys.
Analyzed qualiative data from diary studies, interviews/focus groups and provided design insights and feedback.
Tested each design before release, and supervised topics of inclusion and cultural awareness in design.
Methods: participatory design workshop, semi-structured interviews/focus groups, diary studies, surveys, qualitative data analysis
Institutions: UCI, 2 schools
Stakeholders: HCI reserachers and educators, teen youth, NSF, middle and high school teachers
Challenge: How do youth in early adolescence conceptualize self-regulation? How can we co-design a re-design of an app that captures their concept of self-regulation and that youth will use?
Description:
This project uses participatory design methods to understand how wearable devices can support self-regulation in teens,
and re-design Tenacity, meditation-based application to be more responsive to the youth's needs.
Tenacity consisted on two-parts.The first part is a participatory design workshop with 27 teens ages 11-14, from a intermediate school in Santa Ana,CA,
where the youth brainstormed and created ideas of tools that would aid them in self-regulation.
These designs were taken in by the design team to redesign the app.
The second part consists on a field deployment and design iteration, where youth tested the app for two weeks.
For the second part, we worked with 35 participants between the ages of 11-15 across two states.
Outcomes:
We discovered that youth defined self-regulation as a tool instead of a skill, and had valuable and distinct design preferences,
which were incorporated into the final design.
Youth responded positively to the re-deisgn wearable version in comparison to the previous application for ipad, resulting in higher
levels of satisfaction and use.
They also showed interest in some features for sharing achievements and competitive play, while having the priority option of mantaining their privacy.
We discovered three design tensions, which were central in shifting our perceptions of self-regulation to meet youth’s interests and practices.
Funded by National Science Foundation
