research-article

Open access

“What's Your Name Again?”: How Race and Gender Dynamics Impact Codesign Processes and Output

Authors:

Judith Odili Uchidiuno,

Jessica HammerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Volume 30, Issue 6

Article No.: 85, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/3603624

Published: 25 September 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

Creating technology products using codesign techniques often results in higher end-user engagement compared to expert-driven designs. Codesign sessions are typically structured in flexible and informal ways to achieve equal design partnerships, especially in adult-child interactions. This generally leads to better design output, however, it may also increase the enactment of socially constructed stereotypes and biases in ways that negatively affect the experiences of racial minorities and girls/women in design spaces. We codesigned a video game with a K-5 afterschool program located in a working-class, rural, predominantly white county over 20 weeks. We uncover ways that the codesign process and different activity types can create a permissive environment for enacting behaviors that are harmful to minorities. We discuss ways to manage and restructure codesign programs to be more conducive for children and adults from diverse backgrounds, ultimately leading to healthier design partnerships.

1 Introduction

Codesign is a collection of design techniques informed by existing practices of participatory design [22, 23]. The goal of codesign is to create a collaborative environment between design experts and end users to support co-creation of products that incorporate input from all stakeholders equally. A key consideration of codesign practice is the relative power balance that exists between designers, who are experts in creative practice, and end users, who are experts in their own context and lived experience. This attention to relative power becomes particularly important for adults codesigning with children, who may perceive their difference in age and technical expertise as a barrier. Participatory design researchers advocate that work with children should strive to construct an equal partnership to ensure that children feel that their input is being taken seriously [10, 23, 36, 56, 96]. In most codesign-based research studies, participants’ contributions to the design process are centered around their domain knowledge or experiential expertise. For example, Woodward et al. conducted codesign sessions with a multiracial group of children aged 7–12 years old to understand their conception of Intelligent User Interfaces, and found that they expected behaviors beyond user input and system output that required advanced system intelligence; their research informs the design of future interfaces targeted at children [92].

Little attention is paid to how sociocultural factors, such as race and gender, may influence participants’ design input or interact with the methods used to solicit it. The lack of consideration for such factors seems increasingly naive given ongoing evidence of systemic racial and gender inequality in the United States and elsewhere [77]. Codesign participants – adults and children alike – present with obvious cultural, racial, and gender identifiers. Adults and even children as young as three years old express racial and gender bias toward others regardless of age [1, 47, 63, 65]. Thus, to the extent that participants respond to presented identity characteristics of their peers and research investigators, there is potential for biases to impact the codesign process. Such biases also imbue the codesign process itself with risk: methods intended to surface participants’ preferences around a topic could also give voice to and amplify associated harmful messaging around those topics (e.g., exclusion of members of historically minoritized groups).

It is common practice in the research literature to describe demographic (such as race, age, and gender) breakdowns of codesign participants, and sometimes codesign facilitators as a matter of identifying participant populations, e.g., [92, 94], but rarely are these demographic identifiers utilized as a lens to unpack codesign interactions or output. Such data would be useful for understanding the relative socio-cultural positions of the youth participants and adult researchers. For example, we note that when demographics of both participants and the researchers are provided, e.g., [95], researchers tend to either come from racially dominant groups or are of a similar race as the children involved. In these cases, researchers may simply have higher status and power in the activity. However, this relationship may be significantly complicated when adult design partners are members of a minoritized group, while participants are not. Further complications may emerge when heterogeneous groups of youth participants codesign together. We argue that the dynamics of the complex context created during codesign itself – involving youth and adult participants, researchers, and the norms and content of the design domain – deserves careful attention. In this article, we provide a characterization of interactions between participants when eliciting design input, when some occupy privileged positions within the subject domain, and others are systemically disadvantaged.

Our data is drawn from observations and experiences codesigning programming games with students aged 5–12 in three different afterschool communities. We ran a codesign program over approximately 20 weeks primarily led by an African-descent woman researcher with a PhD from a well-known school in the area. Most interactions related to this research topic was collected from an afterschool program serving a predominantly white, rural, working-class community. We focus on this site as this was the only place where the primary researcher was locally minoritized with regards to both race and gender – other sites had at least 50% representation of girls and/or black students attending the program. We detail game design interactions with children in this community and uncover issues related to race, gender, and perceived expertise that appear to influence student interactions with researchers, as well as with minority students in the space. Certain kinds of tasks – an identity-based art project, a bias-understanding activity, and a dance programming activity – amplified racist, sexist, and sexually inappropriate behavior towards adult researchers and other minoritized children in the codesign space. We argue that the adult-child power-ceding patterns of codesign, combined with a researcher with minoritized status in the domain of the activity, creates a dysfunctional power dynamic that can lead to unexpected and problematic results when gathering data using common codesign activities. These activities become opportunities for harmful discourse, and the design data produced can be of inferior quality. Focusing on three design activities, we illustrate how these power dynamics impact the design process and discuss how researchers can modify their roles in codesign spaces to foster a more effective partnership with children.

Our research takes place in the context of video game design, where long-standing biases toward white, male developers and audiences have been underscored through both prevailing patterns of underrepresentation [27, 63] and recent high-profile incidents of bias [42, 63]. However, the patterns of bias, complex power dynamics, and hijacking of activities that we describe are general, reflect the need for caution in any setting where participatory codesign is employed, and speak to a need for additional nuance in the theoretical conception of participant empowerment in codesign settings. We remind readers that while some interactions reported in this study may be considered offensive or even harmful to other codesign participants, the onus to avoid such situations lies with researchers and research communities. Our article provides a glimpse of problems that require careful consideration at a methodological level, highlights ways that codesign methods may fail minoritized researchers, and suggests improvements in the design of codesign programs to better support minoritized members of design groups.

2 Background

2.1 Equality in Codesign

“Codesign” is a participatory design technique in HCI that describes a collection of intentional approaches to the creation of social, socio-technical, and technological systems in partnership with end users. The co- typically stands for one or more of cooperative, collaborative, collective, or connective through structured arrangements of participation across stakeholder groups to advance the development of innovative social systems and technological products [97]. Codesign can result in better ideas, more thorough need finding, greater creativity, higher quality outcomes, and durable collaborative relationship-building across people and organizations [82]. Codesign represents a purposeful sharing of design authority by one stakeholder group that would hold it by default – architects, game designers, researchers or software engineers, for instance – with other stakeholders who have relevant but substantially different perspectives on the system under design [76, 82]. Most literature on codesign practice, therefore, centers on methods by which these holders-by-default of design authority can productively confer design authority onto others less empowered – for example, by amplifying participants’ contributions and voiced needs as experts of their own experiences [86, 90].

Common practices for codesign between adults (usually designers or design researchers) and children in educational contexts are typical of codesign approaches in general. Equal power often refers to both parties having the same opportunity to generate and contribute ideas, design artifacts, and make decisions [22, 23, 36]. All design partners work together to create technologies by children for children, reinforcing the need for children's expertise due to their knowledge of childhood, experts of their own enjoyment, and their user experience [94]. In most other adult-child interactions, e.g., in schools, at home, or other recreational spaces, adults occupy a position of power. Therefore, they must make concerted efforts to adjust their authority and empower children to contribute equally in codesign settings [58]. Achieving this equal power in codesign is no easy feat – typically adult-child codesign relationships are broken down along four key dimensions: facilitation, relationship building, design by doing, and elaboration, which vary along a spectrum of balanced and unbalanced interactions, where adults dominate in some areas and children in others [94]. Therefore, adults and children do not always have equal power on all these dimensions even in the most successful codesign partnerships. Some researchers such as Scaife et al. maintain that the expectation of equality in codesign is impractical, and therefore adult codesigners should regard children as native informants and solicit their design ideas as needed [77]. Others, such as Yip et al., suggest that in addition to striving to be equal members, researchers need to also implement equitable practices to allow children to contribute equally regardless of the power balance [94].

Practitioner guides advise adult codesign facilitators to carefully attend to the power imbalance that comes from their implicit authority as adults [23]. Techniques such as sitting at equal height, wearing similar casual clothing, setting common goals, and providing social opportunities such as “snack time” for adults and children to get to know each other as people outside of the design work, are recommended as part of a long-term process of creating a culture where children are regarded as legitimate codesign contributors [24]. These tactics have allowed children from different backgrounds to contribute valuable and diverse insights to design processes [28, 48]. However, we note that these techniques and guidance focus on power ceding dynamics— a one-way, partial transfer of design authority from adult researchers to others. It inadequately accounts for a more complex landscape of power relations that exists when, for instance, a design researcher belongs to a historically marginalized ethnic group and facilitates codesign programs with children from dominant ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

These aspects of codesign have been understudied, especially given growing consideration of pervasive systemic racial and gender inequity in society. To determine how scarce such studies are in HCI, we conducted a systematic review of all articles published in the last 10 years on adult-child codesign interactions. We searched the ACM Digital Library¹ for published articles using the keywords “adult child codesign”, “adult child participatory design” and “cooperative inquiry”. We also performed a forward search on authors who cited Druin's foundational articles [22, 23] that defined and described the implementation of equal partnerships in adult child codesign interactions. We discovered 31 articles that fit our criteria and found that while most provided race and gender information of their participants as demographic descriptors, only two provided this same information for adult researchers, and of those only one article [45] investigated how these sociocultural factors impact codesign interactions and outcomes. Power sharing is foundational to codesign, yet existing research largely ignores the possibility that the researcher-participant power relationship could be complex, and that researchers may not always start out “holding all the cards”. Our research explores how the ideals and dynamics of codesign power sharing intersect with sociocultural factors such as race and gender in codesign practice.

2.2 Racial and Gendered Expectations for STEM Learning Among Children

Racism and sexism are ubiquitous in most societies even among children – from a very young age, children are sensitive to racial and gender stereotypes, which can affect their experiences in both learning and play [46, 67]. Children often have gendered beliefs and experiences when it comes to thinking about intelligence and computing in play and learning. For example, Martin et al. found that children who perceive games, toys, and activities to be suitable for their gender have better memory, performance with, and expectations of success for them [55]. Also, Bian et al. found that children are more likely to ascribe high intelligence to boys than girls, and girls were therefore more likely to avoid games and playful activities that they perceived as being for children with higher intelligence [8]. When it comes to studying STEM, girls are less likely than boys to get encouragement from external sources [59], with teachers and other adults potentially playing a role in modeling and reinforcing gendered stereotypes around STEM learning. Teachers often observe these gendered stereotypes in STEM but may not have adequate training to address these challenges [34]. Engagement with games, including educational STEM games, may be influenced by negative domain stereotypes and bias, which affect girls more than boys [18]. Colley et al. found that girls experience more computing anxiety than boys, with boys playing more computer games than girls [17].

Black girls face multiple, compounding barriers to STEM learning as they hold multiple minoritized identities. They on average score lower on science literacy assessments compared to white girls [37]. External factors play a role in holding back these learners in STEM education, including decreased self-esteem and self-perception from stereotyping early on in life [81] and stereotypical images that act as a reference point from which they are not expected to achieve as much compared to their white counterparts, and therefore are overlooked in learning opportunities. For example, Brickhouse et al. show that high achieving Black girls may be underestimated in ability by their instructors and not given as many resources [12]. This is exacerbated by limited culturally responsive learning practices, constraining Black girls to middle-class norms for how to learn and behave [64]. Addressing this, King & Pringle [49] found that educational experiences that are contextualized to cultural values, include opportunities for direct engagement, and centering their experiences can embolden Black girls’ learning STEM.

To address these challenges in the US, there have been several early education through college initiatives incorporating culturally relevant computing and computational thinking into other domains to increase the participation of ethnically underrepresented women in computing [25, 53, 70]. Although these efforts have led to an overall increase of women in STEM, they have seen limited success with black women as they fail to holistically address the intersectional identities e.g., the effects of race, socio economic class, ethnicity, and gender that work together to hinder black women's participation in computing [13, 70, 72]. Black women are particularly underrepresented in doctoral level computing degrees – majority of these degree opportunities take place in predominantly white institutions which fail to adequately meet their socioemotional and cultural needs [14, 38].

Black women's intersectional identities are at core of their computing experience regardless of their level of educational attainment. In the past decade, researchers have begun to highlight the experiences of black women in undergraduate and graduate computing degrees e.g., [70], however, there is limited insight to the experiences of black women whom despite the odds, successfully attain the highest computing degrees and work as faculty or researchers in predominantly white spaces. Our research sheds some light on how black women's intersectional identities affect the power balance during codesign in predominantly white spaces and calls for the need to center the identity of researchers in the design of participatory design studies.

2.3 Minoritization

Minoritization refers to the sociocultural marginalization of members of a racial group due to their underrepresentation, which goes beyond simply being a statistical minority [10]. Members of certain race, gender, age, and other groups are ascribed less power by default within domains and subcultures as a consequence of historical representation within those spaces. These identities frequently conflict with other sources of power, such as authority as a teacher, creating complicated power dynamics. In educational contexts, this extends to both adult-child and collegial interactions. For example, in predominantly white workplaces, minoritized teachers face numerous challenges in establishing and maintaining credibility and authority when teaching [16, 50, 66], and often feel like outsiders in work environments [43, 85]. When students interact with instructors of color, they may question their status in ways that are linked to race, gender, and oppressive structures [40, 84, 85]. One study found that students routinely questioned if a Black lecturer was teaching a topic from a skewed perspective [66]. Another study highlighted that instructor race and gender had a substantial impact on student compliance, indicating that Black women instructors had less power in the classroom [27]. These studies highlight the complicated power dynamics that occur between race, gender, age, and research contexts, and imply that these detrimental effects may also apply in codesign settings.

In the context of video games, women are frequently marginalized by members of the self-identified “gamer” demographic, which constructs itself as hypermasculine and white [42]. Although 45% of video game buyers are women, the stereotype of who plays video games and who is considered a serious gamer has largely been dominated by men [63, 83]. This view is often bolstered by a lack of diversity within high-profile gaming communities and firms, and is exacerbated by the persistent idea that women only play games casually [27]. Furthermore, men routinely harass female game developers for imagined slights [76]. As a result, women codesign facilitators may be considered outsiders in the game design context, either by explicit doubt of their expertise or direct derision and harassment merely for being present. When they demonstrate their gaming knowledge, they can face resistance, particularly from people who identify with “gamer” norms and regard them as “intruders” who aren't “real” gamers because of their gender and other identifiers. In such situations, age and authority alone may not be enough to overcome such pushback.

3 Methodology

This study draws on a retrospective analysis of observational and participant artifact data produced during a video game codesign effort spanning the 2021–2022 academic year. The project was a collaboration with an afterschool organization in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, which has over a dozen clubhouses in demographically diverse regions of the city, to collaboratively create a video game where players program robot partners to accomplish goals together. The game was intended as an educational product, as well as a pedagogical exercise to foster students’ identity as designers, increase their programming knowledge, and robotics domain knowledge. We ran a 20-week program focusing on the codesign of game characters and narratives, block programming instruction, and game testing and iteration.

The first 7–8 weeks were dedicated to codesigning the game. In this capacity, students were informed that they were partnering with our research team to create a video game where they collaborated with a robot by programming it to accomplish their in-game goals. Using different codesign instruments and activities, we explored different game narratives, co-created game characters and settings, negotiated game mechanics, and so on. Our research team transformed raw student game design input (such as art sketches, written and verbal narratives, 3D artifacts, student game play observation data, etc.) into high level game stories in different art styles for student feedback. We presented those stories to students and negotiated details (often proposing completely new game stories) until the entire team (adults and children) reached consensus. Finalized game designs were based on the agreed game stories, research observations and discussions around the children's favorite games inclusive of both digital, analog, and physical games.

The next 8 weeks were focused on block programming instruction to equip students with the skills needed to program their robots. This time also allowed our software development team to create a prototype version of the game. We were interested in any possible STEM identity transformations that could possibly occur as a result of students receiving this instruction and utilizing it in their game play. Therefore, we employed several activities such as surveys measuring self-report of their programming and computer science interest, students indicating their interest in different STEM and non-STEM jobs, creating humanoid sketches to measure if they could envision themselves as programmers, and so on. Most of the activities reported in this article came from this phase of the study where we employed different codesign instruments to teach children block programming in engaging ways (e.g., a dance routine coding activity) and evaluated students’ identity and biases as it related to being a programmer.

During the last 4 weeks of our program, we iteratively tested the game with students. Students tested and critiqued prototype and beta versions of the game, often modifying the game elements, narratives, and mechanics before they were presented with a final version for testing. At the end of the program, the entire team (students, clubhouse staff members, and researchers) had a celebratory pizza party commemorating our collective accomplishments. Our participants got a chance to showcase their game to the other staff members and students in the club, and they were each presented with certificates of accomplishment to acknowledge their efforts dedicated to codesigning the game.

Each codesign session was one hour long and consisted of snacking and icebreakers, scheduled codesign activities, and students playing diverse-genre video games from a curated selection. Clubhouse staff members sometimes joined our sessions and assisted with their facilitation. We designed our program for attendance by 6–8 students but adjusted to accommodate much larger groups as necessary. We obtained written consent from students’ parents/guardians – students and were informed that their data was going to inform the creation of a video game, and that they would engage in several activities exploring their different identities related to video games and programming. Our research was approved by our university's Institutional Review Board (IRB). All site names used are pseudonyms.

3.1 Positionality Statement

Given that our research addresses racial and gender biases in computing and participatory design, we include a positionality statement indicative of the makeup of our research team. We are comprised of a diverse group of professionals including game designers, HCI researchers, robotics educators, and game developers from diverse cultural backgrounds such as black and white women, East and Southeast Asian women, and white men. Table 1 breaks down the demographic information and experience of each adult participant as it relates to video game design, participatory design methods, and community engagement.

Table 1.

ID	Ethnicity and Gender	Role in Research Study	Experience
R1	Black African woman	Lead/Assisting program facilitator + Data Analysis	PhD in Human Computer Interaction. 8 years of experience codesigning education technologies in low-income areas in the US, and rural villages in Tanzania. Successfully codesigned early literacy technologies, interactive displays, and social media applications with Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian students and their families in different US states. R1 has also worked with teachers to codesign statewide, middle school curriculums to increase culturally responsiveness and engagement in learning materials.
R2	White man	Lead Programmer. Developed co-designed games and data analytic tools that support each game. Facilitated co-design sessions, and player tests. Analyzed and implemented co-design data from sessions and playtests to future app iterations / versions.	B.S. in Computer Science. 8 years in K-12 robotics education. 10 years of game development using Unity3D. Significant experience deploying applications, testing, and teaching in out of school spaces.
R3	White man	Assisted with video annotation and data analysis, remote note taking and data gathering, and game design and implementation	BSc. in Computer Science. 20 years of experience in research, development, and outreach in K-12 robotics education. Significant development experience in games and simulations featuring a programmable robot agent.
R4	Asian American man	PI. Assisted with note taking, research team debrief, and analysis. Game design contributor.	PhD in Learning Sciences. 20 years of development experience and 10+ years research experience in subject domain. Significant personal experience with games and game design.
R5	Asian American woman, interracial adoptee	Assisted with data collection at afterschool programs (onsite and virtually), assisted with analysis	PhD student with background in culturally responsive computing education, DEI-centered research, and collaboration beyond academics, and supporting gender diversity in STEM. Research background in learning science and online education.
R6	Black American woman	Assisting program facilitation + Lead Game Designer	10+ years of educational experience in classroom and after-school settings with children aged 3-18 in affluent and low-income racially diverse areas in the US. Award-Winning Game Designer and games academic with experience in both digital and analog games. 5 years of research experience centered on qualitative methods and interpretation.
R7	White man	Assisted with data collection and analysis and game design	PhD in Human Computer Interaction. 10+ years of experience working on evaluation and design of educational games, primarily focused on K-12 STEM topics.
R8	White woman	Assisted in note taking and gathering data remotely.	M.S.Ed in Instructional Technology. 4 years experience working in elementary classroom settings. 3 years development experience in computer science and robotics curricula.
R9	Asian man	Assisted in annotation of recorded video sessions, note taking, and gathering data remotely	B.Sc. in Computer Engineering. 22 years in robotics education, development of educational software, and outreach.

Table 1. Demographic and Experience Positionality of Research Team Members

Together, we represent more than 20 years of experience conducting research, 22 years engaging with afterschool programs in our local communities, and have educated thousands of students with our robotics and game design curriculums. Most codesign and programming sessions were facilitated by R1 as she had the most participatory design research experience. The second half of the programming instruction and the game testing phases were led by R2, who had the most experience creating block programming interfaces and testing game prototypes. All sessions were conducted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, so the lead facilitator attended each session in person (double-masked) and was accompanied remotely (via Zoom) by another member of the study team who took notes, and actively participated in session interactions.

3.2 Reflexivity

Due to the nature of our research, we draw on literature on reflexivity to examine our prior expectations, assumptions, and beliefs related to the research context and participants [21, 29, 62, 88]. The first author (R1) was born and raised in western Africa and had no prior experiences of racial and gender biases directed against her from children. The other members of the team were born and raised in diverse cultural backgrounds in the United States — they too had no expectations of such biases to arise when working with this particular after-school program. However, we expected to observe differences in students’ gameplay and design input resulting from their residing in a rural area. Indeed, we observed the influence of this factor in students game design input. Students experience working in farms, engaging in outdoor unstructured play time, and expectations of limited rules in gaming heavily influenced their game design narrative and mechanics. Students had more computing and programming exposure than we expected, as they had access to computing devices and instruction through the afterschool program and their schools.

When issues related to racial and gender biases surfaced in our research, we recognized that it would be impossible to neutralize its influence on our subjectivity when analyzing the data due to our intersectional identities. Prior research studies discourage the approach of neutralizing researchers’ reflexivity as it is practically impossible and does not capitalize on their unique perspectives and interpretation of the data [52, 68]. As a result, we capitalize on our team's interpersonal reflexivity using multiple approaches in our data collection, data analyses, and data reporting [4, 74] . In our data collection, we included artifacts that examined students’ race and gender biases related to careers in computing. Following the results collected, we worked to increase student's exposure by specifically including instruction materials showcasing women and people of color as experts in different computing careers, e.g., we watched videos of diverse-race professional athletes who were competent programmers, and we exposed students to applications of programming in movies and fashion spearheaded by people of color.

In our data analysis, all video recordings of our program sessions where independently analyzed by four different researchers from diverse backgrounds (R1, R3 R5, and R9), capitalizing on our diverse backgrounds in the interpretation of the data [15, 26, 51]. We individually annotated in minute-by-minute intervals all interactions influenced by students racial and gender biases. After independently analyzing the videos, all annotations were arranged side-by-side by timestamps, and we engaged in reflexive dialog about each incident considering the interpretation of events from each annotator in a large team meeting [39, 80]. We discussed our individual interpretations of the incidents recorded, and only included the ones where the entire team agreed that there was a clear bias in the interaction. In our reporting of this work, we also acknowledge where interruptions to our data collection and interrogation occurred because of the primary facilitator's discomfort towards the data collected in different sessions.

3.3 Participants and Program Partners

In this article, we focus on our interactions with one clubhouse which we shall refer to as Clear Bridge. We use this site as the focus of our research, as it was the only location where the first author was minoritized in terms of race, gender, and demographic area (urban vs. rural setting). Clear Bridge is in a rural county where white families make up 95% of the population. The after-school program was located in an independent learning center – students were either bussed in from school or dropped off by their parents. We do not have income data on the families that attended the program, but program administrators shared that most families were able to afford the $90 weekly fee per child. Ten students participated in our program (3F/ 7M; ages 6–10; 8 white, 2 Hispanic). On the average, six students attended each session coordinated by two researchers, and sometimes an additional staff member from the club. Families enrolled their children at the club house primarily for homework assistance (particularly math) and after-school enrichment.

We make behavioral comparisons with our interactions from two other clubhouses in the network: Green Hill and Golden Grove. Green Hill is located in a low-income urban town where black families make up 58% and white families are 39% of the population. Families enrolled their children there to gain exposure to new things and keep them safe and cared for by trustworthy adults. At Green Hill, 24 students (6F/ 18M; ages 5–14; 22 black, 2 white) attended our program. Finally, Golden Grove is located in a middle-class urban neighborhood occupied by many professionals in the medical sciences and humanities. White families make up the majority of the population (68%) with black (23%) and Asian (6%) families as well. Ten students (5F/ 5M; ages 7–12; 3 black, 7 white) attended our program. Families enrolled their children at this clubhouse to attend specific STEM, arts, and sports programs that were all included in their after-school curriculum.

3.4 Data Gathering and Analysis

All sessions were video and audio recorded with consent from the clubhouse and student families for further analysis. The primary and secondary researchers met after each session to discuss data gathered from each session and clarify any areas of confusion. These meetings were recorded as well. All team members attended a weekly data analysis meeting to review all session interactions from the different network sites, design and refine planned session activities, refine research questions, and reflect on how our programs contributed to our video game design and the HCI community overall. We recorded these data analysis meetings and analyzed them as part of the data for our research. Analysis directly relevant to game design decisions were prioritized during the development period, while notable observations not critical to immediate development needs were flagged for later re-examination in depth.

We followed an inductive data analysis approach, conducting a thematic analysis [11] on all student-student and student-researcher interactions on topics related to racial and gender biases. As stated in the “Reflexivity” section above, four members of our research team independently annotated each session video broken down by one-minute intervals. The whole team then compared the annotations from both researchers side by side and collectively tagged each interaction where a sociocultural stereotype or bias influenced the treatment of minoritized adults and children in the space or codesign interaction. These tags were then aggregated to cohesive themes to which we conducted a thematic and artifact analysis [11] to: (1) identify any student interactions that were harmful to someone from a different race or gender and (2) how such interactions affected the behavior of the design partners or affected the research process and outcomes. The entire team discussed each theme extensively to clarify all areas of confusion. Where necessary, the team watched session videos as a group where multiple perspectives were needed to unpack the interactions and we triangulated our findings with student-generated artifacts to ensure that all evidence was mutually supportive.

4 Findings

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence-based insights that can improve the codesign research method and adult-child interactions in settings where adults or other children are racial or gender minorities in a research space. This study is not a critique of our participants, partners, or their communities. We ask that readers bear in mind that systemic and unconscious biases are ubiquitous in human society, and that research such as ours is intended to advance knowledge, discourse, and the improvement of methods to mitigate their effects. Where possible, we exclude gender and age identifiers from reporting specific incidents to protect our participants’ identities. We also intentionally avoid referring to students with pseudonyms – common names are inherently cultural and shifts the spotlight away from the effects of the phenomena observed. The focus of this article is not individuals, sites, or specific behavior, but the complexities of power structures in codesign partnerships and how they can lead to misappropriation of well-intentioned instruments. To this end, we first describe the ways that negative racial and gender stereotypes affect the experiences of minoritized adults and children in codesign spaces. We follow this by describing three codesign activities – a sketching activity, a bias understanding activity, and a dance activity - to illustrate how they can be co-opted to exacerbate racist and sexist discourse without proper scaffolding.

4.1 Race and Gender Power Dynamics in Codesign Settings

To begin, we describe incidents at Clear Bridge that show how race and gender were made present in the codesign process, both between students and facilitators, and among students. Most the stereotyping and bias described in our study was directed at R1 – likely because she was the only member of a racial minority physically present for over half of the codesign sessions, and she presented with several minoritized identifiers (black, woman, woman in a game design setting, etc.). She was introduced to students as Dr. J – staff members at the clubhouse and other partner networks called her that even before the program began. The other facilitators from our research group were introduced similarly with the Mr., Ms., or Dr. titles before their first or nicknames. All the students and staff followed this naming practice, except for one student, who refused to address R1 by the Dr. title, or even her first name. In other sessions, the student addressed R7 (white woman taking notes remotely) using her first name only but addressed R2 and R3 (white men) using their titles and first names. To attract R1’s attention, the student would just ask her questions loudly or make comments directly without calling her name. Sometimes, they intentionally mispronounced her African-origin last name despite knowing the correct pronunciation. One of such interactions between the student and the primary facilitator is detailed below:

Student: What's your name again?
R1: Dr. J
Student: No, the other name?
R1: Judith
Student: No, I mean your real name. They followed that by mispronouncing her last name in several different ways
R1: Would you like for me to teach you the right way to pronounce my last name?
Student: [smirks] No. I know how to say it… they follow that by pronouncing her last name correctly

Students generally started each session by playing video games before we arrived on site, so we usually had to stop their game play to engage in any planned activities – which sometimes caused them to complain. For most students, we were able to redirect their attention back to the codesign activities by asking them repeatedly, with the promise of more game play after the session activities. As sessions progressed, some students’ dissatisfaction quickly degenerated into ignoring instructions despite repeated requests, verbally complaining about the codesign activities, yelling at R1, and even air punching and kicking toward her in anger. R1 tried different strategies including putting their computers to sleep, shutting them down, and unplugging them but they usually responded by turning the computers back on in defiance, understanding that she was not serving in a formal teaching or disciplinary role. In a few incidents, a few students tried to speak up against the inappropriate behaviors but were yelled at by the offending students to stay out of it.

Some students also expressed disdain at R1 whenever they mentioned a word that she was not familiar with e.g., a rig (a truck consisting of a tractor and trailer together), a harrow (farm implement used to pulverize soil and uproot weeds), and so on. When she asked them to tell her what it meant, they often responded by saying “everyone else in the world knows this” in a derogatory way, and then asked (R2 – white man) who facilitated remotely to explain it to her. R2 noticed their deference to him over R1 on several occasions and began addressing her by her formal title and referring to her as the expert in the room but that had no impact on students’ behavior toward her. Their disregard for her presence and authority in the space extended to their use of her personal computing device. On several occasions, they intentionally navigated away from the presentation materials on R1’s computer or turned off the speakers/microphones/camera on the zoom meeting with the secondary facilitators. When she (and the remote facilitator) cautioned them against doing this, they responded saying that the laptop belonged to their computer lab (despite their lab having only desktop computers), therefore they had the right to do whatever they pleased.

The adult staff at the clubhouses often served as the common authority figure needed to address students’ conduct and maintain order. However, when staff needed to step out of the room, we observed more unruly behavior. As expected, these behaviors were quite distressing to R1, but it was very difficult to balance her role as the design partner/facilitator that the codesign process necessitated to being an authority figure in the space. She was also highly sensitized to the cultural differences between her and the students and was not sure how to enforce discipline in a way that was not perceived as racially motivated. Similar behaviors were often directed towards two other racial minority students who participated in the sessions. Their names too were intentionally mispronounced and mocked in several incidents, and they were never invited to join in multiplayer games despite their expressed interest. After two sessions, both students stopped attending our program despite their high engagement with the activities and their prior programming experience. When we inquired about them, the program staff said they were no longer interested in joining, and we learned that they left the club entirely a few weeks later.

The gender-based stereotyping was directed R1 and R8, and the other girls in the room. These behaviors ranged from never addressing them by formal titles, interrupting them and ignoring instructions, and insulting other girls in the room when they did not agree with their contributions. In a more formal or traditional teaching space, students would have likely faced some disciplinary action as soon as they started harassing a teacher or other students in the class. However, codesign spaces are designed to be informal and flexible, and sometimes regard seemingly transgressive rhetoric from disruptive students as valid design input. For example, students who routinely disregarded the codesign activities and/or disrespected other students and adults in the space were allowed to continue to participate in our sessions until their presence caused more harm than good to the group overall. Unfortunately, this extensive accommodation normalized disruption among other students, and even those that were otherwise well behaved started engaging in similar behaviors.

4.2 Co-opting Codesign Activities to Enact Harmful Discourse

We now present insights from three design sessions detailing ways that different codesign activities were co-opted to enact harmful discourse targeted at minoritized students and adults in the codesign space. These sessions were chosen as they employ popular codesign activities e.g., creating humanoid sketches and dance-based activities, or were designed to uncover students biases. These examples illustrate the importance of considering the demographic makeup of design partners and imagining the possible ways that activities can be misused to allow for effective scaffolding.

4.2.1 Humanoid Sketches.

One of the codesign tasks we used involved creating humanoid representations through digital sketches, a popular activity in adult-child codesign settings. Some research studies have employed this technique as a vehicle for children to describe their experiences [93], to design game characters [2], or to visualize students’ understanding of other people [33]. Students were specifically informed that we wanted to understand if they had interacted with programmers in the past, and were instructed to create a sketch of what they imagined a programmer would look like using a publicly available avatar tool in Scratch.² We deployed this activity to understand whether students could envision themselves as programmers at various points during the program. The plan was to collect this data at the beginning and end of our program to determine if there were any transformations to students’ identity as programmers. For instance, we planned to see whether more students would build avatars that looked like themselves. For most, this activity was effective - they created avatars that were in alignment with information that they had previously shared with us. All students at Golden Grove shared that they knew a programmer or had some prior instruction from school, with their parents at home, or from the club. They created avatars that looked either like themselves or someone they knew (see Figures 1(A) and 1(B)). In contrast, most students at Green Hill neither had prior programming experience nor had ever met a programmer so they created sketches of what they imagined a programmer would look like (see Figures 1(C) and 1(D)).

Fig. 1.

While this activity mostly served its intended purpose, it was also an opportunity for students at Clear Bridge who intended to be disruptive to create avatars that communicated embodied stereotypes. Some students purposefully created avatars that embodied multiple racial, ageist, and political stereotypes (Figure 2(A) and 2(B)).

Fig. 2.

Based on these interactions, it was evident that despite their age, students engaged in political talking points that negatively framed US Presidents Joseph Biden and Barack Obama, and 2A's dissatisfaction was embodied in the form of a young black man regardless of President Biden's actual appearance. In another programming activity (from code.org), a student saw an advertisement with a picture of US President Barack Obama and yelled at the computer in response about their disdain for the picture. This made R1 highly sensitized to what her presence as a younger black woman likely represented to some students, but she was unsure of how to address this behavior, not wanting to accuse a young child of creating racist artifacts in a space where she was the only black person. This caused her discomfort with critiquing the images created by those students to maintain a productive activity orientation and resulted in having to discard their data as it related to the original task goal. It is likely that this kind of behavior could have occurred in any activity where children had to create images of people that they themselves do not have a personal connection with.

4.2.2 Stereotype/Identity Association Activities.

Following the avatar creation activity, it was evident that students’ prior programming exposure influenced their perception of what they thought a programmer looked like. It also uncovered several stereotypes, e.g., participants frequently added eyeglasses to make people look like programmers, students with no programming background did not imagine people like themselves as programmers, and so on. As a result, we created a follow-up activity to unpack participants’ internalized (racial and gender) biases toward STEM, and in particular, their perception of careers in programming. Students were specifically informed that we were going to show them pictures of people from different backgrounds, and we wanted them to guess the jobs they had. They were informed that we would reveal the real answers at the end of the exercise. We expected to uncover stereotypes that students associated with different career choices that may hinder them from identifying with the career choice e.g., clothing choices and accessories like eyeglasses, background location information, race and gender related stereotypes, and so on.

Students were first presented with pictures of adults on sheets of article. Each page had a Black, Hispanic, east Asian, south Asian, and white adult dressed in different formal and informal outfits with different backgrounds. In total, the students were shown 20 pictures evenly split by those 5 racial groups, who presented as male and female within each group. Students were not informed that every picture was that of an actual adult (photographs provided with permission) who was currently enrolled in or had recently completed a PhD in a computer science related field (see example in Figure 3). The students voted on whether they thought each person was a programmer and provided a reason for each vote. Given that we only provided them with a photo with no background information, students had to make their guess based on explicit bias factors (such as race, gender, age) or superficial non-identifying factors e.g., hairstyle, clothing, background, and so on.

Fig. 3.

In this activity, students at Clear Bridge relied almost exclusively on their implicit ideas about race and gender to make predictions. They projected that all Black models were not programmers citing reasons like “he looks like a guy who works from home”, “she does not look very intelligent”, “he looks like Lebron James, or a rapper, or football player”, “she looks like Lebron James’ mother”. They asserted that R1, who had been with them for at least 10 weeks, was the same person as a model in the activity whom they had already stated could not have been a programmer. Some students also insisted that most Indian-descent models were not programmers citing reasons like, “she looks like an Indian from Mexico”, “she looks like she is from Africa. Do people from Africa program?”. At another South Asian female model, a student remarked, “she looks like the lady that works for the government [referring to US Vice President Kamala Harris]. She's just dumb”, and another said, “she looks like she does nothing”. Students in this clubhouse projected that every east-Asian model was certainly a programmer with justifications like “he looks like he programmed GTA, Minecraft and everything” and “he does not look like a lazy man — he's Asian!” They were not at all surprised when the R1 shared that one east-Asian woman helped design the Minecraft game in real life. In addition, they believed that most white models were programmers except for one model who took a picture in front of a haystack – they predicted that she worked on a farm. For Hispanic models, they predominantly used environmental cues such as their clothing choices and background buildings to make predictions on whether they were programmers.

Unlike the previous activity, data from this activity produced insights that were extremely useful for understanding the stereotypes that students embodied about programmers and different races of people. However, R1 immediately became aware that despite having (and having been introduced as having) a PhD in a computer science field from a well-known university, and facilitating game design and programming instruction for the students, it was not enough to challenge the assumptions that they had about the abilities and intelligence of black men and women.

4.2.3 Dance-Based Activities.

Dance-based activities are common in codesign settings e.g., [69, 78]. They are typically used to get students moving, to have fun, and introduce them to domain content normally perceived as difficult using a media form that they are familiar with. Our version of the dance activity attempted to measure and build basic computational thinking skills around command sequences and loops. We incorporated this activity into our programming instruction as we were trying to increase student engagement and reduce the monotony of block-based online computer programming instruction. Students were asked to pick a song and choreograph a dance routine to it using common dance moves in Scratch block form (e.g., jump, twist, turn), along with loop structures to repeat certain sequences. This activity was incredibly successful at Green Hill. Students formed teams, choreographed routines, and specifically selected dance moves that were practical for different types of instruction e.g., some moves were much easier to execute in a single statement vs. repeatedly in a loop.

At Clear Bridge, some students used this activity as an opportunity to verbalize stereotypes related to the assumed sexuality of the artists, sang over lyrics using sexually inappropriate language, and danced very provocatively to the songs they picked. Despite being cautioned several times by the facilitator, they continued to be disruptive including making sexually suggestive remarks to girls in the room. Some students got visibly uncomfortable by this behavior and stated that they no longer wanted to participate in the activity. R1 tried to encourage them to stay in the game by volunteering herself to be on their team but the offending students remained disruptive until they were asked to leave the session. To keep the session going, R1 joined the remaining teams, choreographing and dancing with the girls’ and the boys’ teams - the rest of the codesign session went on as planned.

In this incident, R1 felt empowered to intervene because the offending students were causing serious distress to other participants in the space that she had the responsibility to protect. Adult co-design facilitators are better able to context switch to the role of a teacher or authority figure when the wellbeing of other students is threatened. However, adult researchers are hardly prepared for situations where they are the target of stereotypes from children, in an environment where they present with several minoritized identities. Like the humanoid sketching activity, the codesign data gathered from the disruptive students in this session had to be discarded in relation to the research question.

5 Discussion

The primary purpose of this article is to inform codesign methodology and elaborate on ways that researchers can successfully engage in codesign in areas where they occupy minoritized status. Our research uncovered an unstable power dynamic in a codesign setting where the adult researcher was minoritized along race and gender lines within the domain of the codesign product. Although we present data from a single research site, we believe that the observed interactions resulted from it is valuable for reflecting on general assumptions made about power-ceding in codesign, which led to suboptimal activity design and facilitation. More specifically, we argue that: (1) R1 and R8 occupied a position of mixed power within the space by default, rather than high as generally assumed; (2) this initial state, combined with power-ceding activity and facilitation norms, created an unstable and disruptive power dynamic; and (3) this negatively affected the quality of research and design products.

R1’s minoritized status within the subject matter domain of the activities created an unstable power dynamic, both by inviting challenges to her authority, and by inhibiting her ability to respond. The pervasiveness of episodes in which participants created race-based disruptions such as fake-questioning R1’s name or creating a dark-skinned joke character in the avatar creator demonstrate a continuous and intentional undermining of R1’s nominal authority. The prevalence of repeated interruptions and defiance of discipline (such as turning monitors back on when R1 turned them off) indicate that the efforts to undermine her authority were at least partly successful. We thus describe the power dynamic observed within the codesign space not as a principled ceding of power from designer to user, but as a contested space in which R1’s minoritized racial and gender status was used to motivate attacks on her nominal authority and subsequently employed as tools to subvert that authority in an ongoing power struggle.

While in principle, such undermining could be directed at any researcher regardless of race or gender, episodes such as fake-questioning R1’s last name clue us that cultural and/or racial bias played a part. Further, R1’s decision-making considerations at the time point to her desire to adhere to codesign principles as a major complication. In essence, the goal of ceding power to youth participants made it difficult to know when to interrupt a participant's disruptive discourse or when it was a valid design contribution. This was further complicated by the fact that the specifically racial nature of many transgressions created a false but narratively feasible ulterior motive for her to administer discipline along racial lines as the only person in the room directly offended by a racist comment against Black people. Thus, ironically, R1’s minoritized racial identity directly inhibited her ability to effect discipline in response to race-based offenses. Ultimately, and in spite of repeated racial and gendered transgressions against her personally, she erred on the side of letting things continue until the disruption threatened to harm other youth in the room.

The disruptive acts undertaken during this “power struggle” also significantly degraded the codesign process and products. Off-topic diversions wasted time and the collection of design feedback and suggestions, resulting in abridged or hastily described feedback, and likely further loss by omission. Intentionally offensive behavior by some students during the avatar design task influenced others to parrot an offensive, non-serious description of their avatars rather than responding to the original task prompt. In the dance activity, disruptive behaviors targeting gender nearly caused the girls in the room to disengage with the activity. Also, fake-questioning of (even very common) ethnic names of other students, and excluding students from group play experiences may have contributed to two ethnically minoritized students deciding to leave the program several weeks later.

In summary, we found that R1’s intersectional identity, being black and a woman, within the domain of the codesign product motivated pervasive, racially- and gender-motivated activity among participants to challenge and undermine the pillars of her nominal authority, using racial and gendered stereotypes to hijack codesign activities into disruptive events. R1’s ability to maintain a stable and productive codesign processes was impeded by her attempts to preserve a power ceding codesign ideal, and a re-minoritizing cycle of being the only directly offended individual in a room. Cumulatively, this dynamic disrupted her ability to complete codesign activities, lowered the quality of data collected, and threatened to exclude other youth members with minoritized backgrounds.

5.1 Implications for Codesign Theories

Most recent methodological and theoretical approaches to educational codesign stem from Druin's Cooperative Inquiry [22, 36] which is a method of participatory design where adults and children work as equal partners to design technology targeted at children. Children bring important expertise such as knowledge of childhood, understanding of their interests and enjoyment, domain knowledge, and so on. while adults bring the technical expertise and know-how to convert their ideas into finished products [94]. Even when true partnership is not achieved, a central tenet of this approach is that everyone's contributions, children and adults alike, are valued equally by all parties involved [23, 56]. Striving for equal partnership in adult-child codesign interactions almost always refers to adults adjusting their roles to empower children as design partners.

Yet, what we have described is a much more complex relationship between adult and youth in the context of codesign. A codesign researcher working in a domain where they are not a member of the dominant cultural group does not face the same challenges – and thus cannot employ the same techniques – as researchers working in contexts where they have clear design authority. A minoritized researcher does not “hold all the cards” at the start. If they attempt to achieve “equality” by making motions to cede power, they invite a power struggle, because they did not have all the power to begin with. Instead, the complexity of this relationship shows that adult-child codesign must be thought of as a more complex and multidimensional negotiation of design authority within the space. A deeper conceptualization around the distribution of roles, responsibilities, and authority across codesign stakeholders – including the researcher(s) – is needed. This differentiation itself is already present in codesign discourse today, of course. The goal of codesign is not to homogenize the contributions of participants or their roles. What differs is the need for an active specification and negotiation of those roles, as well as the authority needed to see them through – it is not enough to assume productive defaults, or that everyone in the room will have the same expectations around power and authority from the start.

Ultimately, the descriptor of “equality” itself may be ideal, but it is an insufficient north star to guide codesigners from minoritized backgrounds. Attention should be given to where, not just how much, different stakeholders hold power in the design process; and how to attain buy-in for those arrangements. Thus, we suggest that further advancements to codesign theory may benefit from a consideration of how organizing principles of team-building and negotiation may be productively combined with those already present from the field's historical roots in social justice.

5.2 Recommendations for Practice

Researchers cannot simply choose to conduct research only in areas where they are not minoritized. Such restrictions (even self-imposed) would directly perpetuate minoritization within the STEM research community. Similarly, we cannot exclude generative tasks from our codesign repertoire without categorically curtailing participants’ legitimate creative input – arguably, the point of doing codesign in the first place. Instead, in this section, we recommend several areas where partial success or related work suggest promising directions for addressing challenges faced by minoritized codesign researchers.

5.2.1 The Co-optability of Codesign Instruments.

Our experiences raise a fundamental question about the design of well-intentioned codesign instruments. The stereotype/identity association activity was utilized because the more open ended task (humanoid sketching activity) did not provide enough insight on whether students associated people who looked like them as programmers. We intentionally built diverse racial and cultural representation into this activity to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; in no small part so that members of minoritized groups would be able to envision and represent themselves in roles such as “programmer” (and to measure the frequency with which they did). However, in our studies we observed the simple presence of minoritized people in the materials (e.g., a photo of an African American woman in the programmer task) used as a tool to enact racist discourse as part of a pattern of attacks on the researcher's authority in the codesign space. In a very real sense, representation was weaponized against our research team, as well as other minoritized people in the space. Yet, it is hard to imagine how we might pursue representation and inclusion without creating this opening for abuse. This may therefore be an intractable problem from the materials design perspective; the best path to mitigation may lie in the norms and routines surrounding these materials’ use, rather than the materials themselves.

5.2.2 Stereotype and Bias Understanding is Critical Early in the Design Process.

Our research underscores the importance of making the surfacing of stereotypes and biases a critical part of establishing codesign programs to mitigate inter-relational disruptions between design partners regardless of age. We conducted the stereotype understanding activity in response to the biases that were uncovered with the humanoid sketching activity. Conducting this activity at the beginning of our program (rather than 10 weeks later) would have provided us with valuable information that would have better addressed such negative behaviors. We recognize that the specific nature of this task, having students reflect on pictures of actual people, may have further incited biased discourse. A more open-ended, generative version of the task that allows student reflect on their own identity without comparing themselves to others may produce less harmful interactions. Even without an explicit stereotype understanding activity, observing children's interactions with one another and with adults can provide valuable insights on how culturally accepting they are, which may necessitate additional stereotype understanding activities. Bennet's developmental model of intercultural sensitivity [6] provides a valuable framework for understanding the different stages of intercultural sensitivity that students can occupy (summarized in Table 2). Students in the first three stages of this model are ethnocentric in nature – they evaluate the acceptability of other cultures in relation to their own. Students in the last three stages are ethno-relative as they are able to adapt and modify their behavior to thrive in different cultural contexts. The more ethnocentric students are, the more important it is to conduct additional stereotype understanding and intervention activities, such as the one utilized in our study to understand the extent of their bias. We framed this activity in the context of identifying a programmer, but it can be appropriated for use in any other domains.

Table 2.

Stage	Description
Denial	Students are not aware that cultural differences exist e.g., students questioning if Africans can be programmers?
Defense	Students are aware of cultural differences but feel threatened by them
Minimization	Students lessen the importance of others’ culture to protect their own identity
Acceptance	Students recognize the existence of different cultures without making judgements on how positive or negative they are.
Adaptation	Students adapt cognitively and behaviorally and are able to thrive within other cultures
Integration	Students are fully integrated into other cultures, and exhibit their cultural awareness in their everyday interactions

Table 2. Bennet's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity

5.2.3 Co-constructing Rules of Engagement Plans that Prioritize the Wellbeing of Students and Facilitators.

Regardless of the stage of intercultural sensitivity that students are, researchers must recognize that just like formal classrooms, behavior management is critical to the success of every codesign program. We did not do so perfectly; yet, it is also important to understand why and how minoritization made this process more difficult, and how it might be done better. The equal-power design partnership goal of adult-child codesign programs may have the unintended effect of further emboldening students to express negative stereotypes and biases. In our study, the lack of clearly agreed upon consequences when students intentionally disrupted design activities gave room for increasingly harmful behaviors towards minoritized children and adults and encouraged similar disruption from otherwise well-behaved students. The racialized nature of these disruptions created an alternative disciplinary narrative which R1 needed to account for, inhibiting her ability to respond decisively. These issues might have been mitigated by starting each program with co-constructing a culturally responsive rules of engagement plan, with group agreement of behavioral consequences amongst all design partners. Weinstein et al. [90] provide a framework for designing such a plan using an approach that recognizes researchers' ethnocentrism, considers students' cultural backgrounds, incorporates knowledge of the broader social and economic context, and uses culturally appropriate management practices with a commitment to building caring spaces for adults and children alike. We propose that researchers and students co-construct code of conduct contracts together (e.g., as in [5]) so that students and adults can better hold each other accountable for proper behavior.

Delegating the responsibility of conduct management to local clubhouse program managers and staff, where both researchers and students alike defer to their authority, can provide additional benefits of promoting equality between researchers and students, as well as maintaining a respectable code of conduct in the space for all parties. As evidenced in our data, students were much less disruptive when local staff members, who already had the job of enforcing discipline in after- school programs, were present in our design sessions. Deferring this responsibility to them may allow researchers preserve the integrity of the codesign method while maintaining proper behavioral conduct in codesign spaces. It is important to note that this suggestion is not always possible or practical, especially in low resource after-school programs where staff members are overworked, and external programs serve as a temporary reprieve in their day. Nevertheless, having local facilitators involved in the construction of rules of engagement plans at the outset of a codesign program can help to level expectations across stakeholders.

5.2.4 Codesign Facilitator Selection and Training.

Work from researchers such as [61] on intersectionality in HCI can guide our understanding of how different identities intersect and interact in codesign spaces. Approaching equality in codesign partnership using an intersectional lens shows that power imbalances exist, and formal titles and expertise may not shield minoritized adults from their negative effects. In examining the positionality of minoritized researchers, we can understand the likely ways that their identities may be targeted. We are not suggesting researchers only conduct codesign studies with populations that are culturally similar to them – research studies show that exposing students to people from other cultures in unexpected careers can improve their cultural sensitivity [75]. However, we must recognize that in the bid to increase students’ exposure, minoritized children and adults may be exposed to behaviors that can impact their well-being. Codesign programs must include plans to recognize and mitigate such harm including when working with protected populations such as children. Researcher training on how to navigate or respond to sensitive social issues such as racism and sexism should be implemented especially when engaging with research participants that are likely to be ethnocentric. Research institutions and funding bodies need to recognize that while diversity efforts to increase minoritized researchers in codesign spaces may solve some problems, it may introduce others that have long term detrimental effects. These institutions should honor the difficulty of such an undertaking and provide support mechanisms to help researchers manage such interactions.

To address students acting out on preconceived stereotypes in the presence of minoritized adults, we suggest that research programs reduce their dependence on minoritized researchers as singular primary facilitators in codesign interactions. Instead, a management structure where that responsibility is shared with other researchers who share similar identities with students and having them model proper behavior towards minoritized facilitators may be beneficial. We intended to utilize this strategy more often but faced limitations due to COVID-19 restrictions on the number of external people allowed to enter buildings. Prior research studies show that same-race teacher assignments significantly improve learning outcomes for black and white students [28], so this structure may have benefits above and beyond improving adult-child interactions in design spaces.

In adult-child education interactions, adults play expected roles as facilitators and idea contributors, but also unexpected roles as caregivers [36, 60, 79]. Adults also serve as motivators to encourage children to participate, and act as proxies who participate on behalf of children [7]. It is important for adult facilitators to play all these roles to foster proper codesign partnership; when children have preconceived biases about the abilities of adult partners based on race and gender, the task of stepping up to those roles might be insurmountable in the timeframe of a codesign initiative without proper planning and scaffolding. Despite some of these challenges, there are some roles that minority adults are still able to play in these interactions. When children play the role of design informants (brainstorming, critiquing, and utilizing their domain knowledge), adults play the role of interpreters, co-constructing and learning from children's input [23, 91]. Such roles require limited input from adults and can likely be done effectively. Children also play the role of learners in codesign interactions when adults need to teach them prerequisite skills to fully engage in the design process [23, 36, 60]. Students may have negative perceptions of people from certain demographics, but the authority conferred on to teachers (regardless of race) may reduce students’ expression of racial and gender biases.

5.2.5 Increasing Intercultural Sensitivity Among Children.

A complementary approach for making codesign spaces more inclusive for minoritized children and adults is by training or conducting activities that explicitly challenge students’ previously held beliefs. Researchers from other scientific disciplines such as foreign language acquisition have taken different approaches to sensitizing students on how their actions impact people from other cultures [3]. One of such approaches involves giving students opportunities to learn about other cultures, with accompanying education to unpack the meaning of behaviors observed. Such multicultural learning creates opportunities for children to recognize a diversity of perspectives and push past their own cultural expectations [35]. Maddux et al. [54] found that such training increased intercultural sensitivity among children, improved their creativity, and helped reduce their functional fixedness – a term used to describe when people look at others in a preconceived way due to perceptional blocks imposed by societal, intellectual and stereotypical norms [30]. The potential for increased creativity resulting from such training is especially beneficial in codesign settings and likely amplifies the quality of design data gathered.

In other studies, researchers have conducted activities that directly counter preexisting stereotypes as a way of challenging them. Some examples of such activities involve generating adjectives to describe people in atypical roles (e.g., a female car mechanic) or having students memorize schema-inconsistent information such as in [31, 32, 57]. Blair et al. [9] found that when students created images of “strong women, they exhibited weaker gender stereotyping on subsequent tasks” [33]. Related to racial stereotyping, Dasgupta et al. [20] found that when white participants were consistently exposed to positive black role models, they communicated weaker associations with black people and negative stereotypes even 24 hours after the experiment. These researchers found that such activities reduced stereotypical thinking, enhanced humanitarian values, increased students ability to generate unexpected uses of ordinary objects, and allowed them to suggest more original brand names [41, 71, 89]. The exposure to such counter-stereotypical catalysts helps students suppress the activation of existing stereotypes and compels them to stereotype less [9, 20, 44, 73]. These interventions have been found to be effective in both laboratory and real-world studies [87].

The American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) provides a framework that can help researchers set target goals for any intercultural sensitivity training. Students should be able to “interact with awareness, sensitivity, empathy, and knowledge of the perspectives of others; Withhold judgment, examining one's own perspectives as similar to or different from the perspectives of people with whom one is interacting; Be alert to cultural differences in situations outside of one's culture, including noticing cues indicating miscommunication or causing an inappropriate action or response in a situation; Act respectfully according to what is appropriate in the culture and the situation where everyone is not of the same culture or language background, including gestures, expressions, and behaviors; and Increase knowledge about the products, practices, and perspectives of other cultures” [19]. While all these goals may not be achievable, or even necessary for the success of every codesign program, an improvement in any of these dimensions will make codesign spaces healthier and more welcoming to diverse participants. Although there is an increased chance of students communicating racial and gender stereotypes when minoritized researchers facilitate codesign programs, exposing children to diverse researchers regularly (e.g., using guest lectures, ethnographic interviews, and different kinds of multimedia to learn about diverse cultures) might increase cultural awareness and intercultural sensitivity for students without constantly exposing researchers to negative stereotypes communicated by students.

6 Conclusion

We analyzed data from a codesign program in a K-5 after-school clubhouse where researchers with minoritized racial and gender status facilitated sessions with youth from a dominant cultural group. We found that proceeding under prevailing codesign principles of flatly ceding power to youth participants invited disruptive challenges from youth participants in which codesign activities were co-opted to enact racist and sexist discourse in the codesign space. These disruptions substantively lowered the quality of codesign input and may have driven away other youth participants from minoritized groups. However, researchers willingness to invoke strong discipline was complicated by a commitment to power ceding principles, and while protecting themselves and other minoritized students in the room. We suggest that these episodes reveal a critical weakness in adult-child codesign approaches, which largely assume the researcher starts in a position of power. When this assumption is violated – in this case by the presence of a minoritized researcher – it becomes clear that a more involved and nuanced negotiation of roles and authority is necessary between adult codesigners and youth participants.

Footnotes

https://dl.acm.org/.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/237869893/.

References

[1]

Frances E. Aboud. 2012. A social-cognitive developmental theory of prejudice. In Handbook of Race, Racism, and the Developing Child. 55–71. DOI:

Abstract

1 Introduction

2 Background

2.1 Equality in Codesign

2.2 Racial and Gendered Expectations for STEM Learning Among Children

2.3 Minoritization

3 Methodology

3.1 Positionality Statement

3.2 Reflexivity

3.3 Participants and Program Partners

3.4 Data Gathering and Analysis

4 Findings

4.1 Race and Gender Power Dynamics in Codesign Settings

4.2 Co-opting Codesign Activities to Enact Harmful Discourse

4.2.1 Humanoid Sketches.

4.2.2 Stereotype/Identity Association Activities.

4.2.3 Dance-Based Activities.

5 Discussion

5.1 Implications for Codesign Theories

5.2 Recommendations for Practice

5.2.1 The Co-optability of Codesign Instruments.

5.2.2 Stereotype and Bias Understanding is Critical Early in the Design Process.

5.2.3 Co-constructing Rules of Engagement Plans that Prioritize the Wellbeing of Students and Facilitators.

5.2.4 Codesign Facilitator Selection and Training.

5.2.5 Increasing Intercultural Sensitivity Among Children.

6 Conclusion

Footnotes

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

“I'm a little less inclined to do it”: How Afterschool Programs’ Culture Impact Co-Design Processes and Outcomes

Negotiating Systemic Racial and Gender Bias as a Minoritized Adult Design Researcher

Examining Adult-Child Interactions in Intergenerational Participatory Design

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