Honoring Infrastructuring Practices of Community-Based Educators in the Iterative Design of a Creative Mobile App (Poster 8)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Introduction
Community-based educators who work with youth have developed a variety of practices to support youth agency and learning to express their interests and ideas (Kafai et al., 2009; Martin et al., 2016). These facilitation practices often involve working around limitations in existing technological tools, which typically are not designed for use by young people in marginalized communities (Roque et al., 2021).

OctoStudio is a free mobile app that is designed to support young people creating projects that they find personally and culturally meaningful. The OctoStudio project was sparked by requests from educators working in Brazil, India, South Africa, Uganda, and other regions to provide opportunities for youth in their communities to make use of the increasing availability of mobile phones for creative and computational expression. In this poster we share how the iterative design of the OctoStudio app is responding to infrastructuring practices that community-based educators have developed around the needs and interests of youth in their communities, as well as constraints and affordances in locally available systems-level infrastructure (e.g. mobile, data, information, and networking infrastructure).

Methods
We engaged in ongoing iterative design work with long-term partners around the world, whom we have met through our prior initiatives over the past 15 years. Partners are educators and staff from formal and informal learning settings who are deeply connected with youth, families, and educators in their local communities. Design cycles invite partners to use the app, playtest in their communities, and engage in reflection and design discussions with our university-based development team. Documentation and evaluation of the collaborative design process includes analysis of records of online sessions with partners, iterative versions of the app with screenshots of changes, and documents mapping ways that partner feedback has shaped design decisions.


Findings
In the poster we will share specific findings from our work with partners along three primary themes: (1) Working directly with partners foregrounds infrastructuring that leverages existing strengths and practices instead of focusing on what is missing (e.g. building on social structures that support youth participation; developing the platform to support project creation in home languages); (2) Applying insights into existing infrastructure shifts the design of tools to support more accessible participation (e.g. designing for lower-cost devices widely used by local educators and families; leveraging messaging platforms for sharing projects without data fees); (3) Designing more equitable tools requires attention to both systems-level considerations (e.g., supporting users who have no or intermittent data access) and centering designs that support youth expression (e.g, redesigning standard emoji sets to broaden representation of youth's racial and cultural identities; revising the app to inspire youth to make projects that are meaningful to them and their communities through ongoing partnerships with educators in equity-focused community organizations).


Significance
This work illustrates how collaboration with community-based educators through iterative design cycles can provide important insights into local infrastructuring practices and shape the development of creative tools that support more equitable engagement and culturally-sustaining participation by youth, families, and educators across marginalized communities.

Authors

• Natalie Rusk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Rupal Jain, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Caitlin Kennedy Martin, ckMartin Consulting

• Ricarose Roque, University of Colorado - Boulder