Reimagining Technology Myths using Restorying through Design

• In Event: Community, Creativity, Curiosity: An Interactive Demonstration and Workshop Exploring Participatory, Arts-Based Methods Across Diverse Contexts

Abstract

During 2019-2021, Author 1 developed and implemented three computing workshops for Science Advocacy Program (SAP)—a 4-year science museum program that exposes youth from historically-marginalized communities to careers in STEM—in response to concerns scholars have voiced about youth not having educational opportunities to examine the sociopolitical and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies (e.g., generative AI, cryptocurrency, biometrics, etc.). Despite curricular differences across the three implementations, workshop activities were organized around the process of restorying through design (Shaw, 2023) through engaging youth in three practices: (1) naming their everyday realities, (2) situating those realities in historical and cultural contexts, and (3) telling new stories that are rooted in marginalized or silenced perspectives (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018). Inspired by Black women’s imaginative and counternarrative practices when engaging in quilt-making, youth used electronic textiles—fabrics embedded with microcomputers, lights, and sensors stitched together using conductive thread and can be programmed to perform a wide array of actions (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg, & Kafai, 2013)—to design individual, interactive quilt patches that named, historicized, then reimagined present and future narratives and myths surrounding technology. Youth's individual quilt patches from the 2020-2021 workshops were then integrated into a collective, digital quilt that served as a reflective artifact for identifying common and unique themes across the diverse restories.
For the next implementation of the workshop, the authors intend to ground the research methodology in the cultural practices and values of Black women’s quilt-making. Inspired by Toliver’s (2022) use of Black quilting as method, we will stitch together the various expertise and perspectives of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, quilters, teaching artists, and youth and co-design curricular activities and tools that integrate quilting with computational technologies. Similar to how Black women created quilts that communicated their collective experiences and dreams across space and time, we plan to find the seam connecting co-designers’ heterogenous lived experiences with emerging technologies and where those experiences are located within histories and places. Just as important, we intend to highlight not only each co-designer’s unique knowledge surrounding storytelling, imagination, and technology but also how they choose to encode this knowledge into the curricular activities and tools.
Ultimately, our goal is to develop a restorying through design framework for designing STEM learning environments that reflect the ways Black women have used quilt-making as methods of resistance (Davis, 1998), community building (Cash, 1995), sharing their stories (Porter, 1990), and imagining new worlds. While integrating quilting with computation is not a new concept (e.g., Rosner, Shorey, Craft, & Remick, 2018; Mirecki et al., 2022), we hope through this project we can imagine new learning contexts that support youth in addressing the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of technology. We position restorying through computational quilt-making as a medium for revealing sociocultural imaginaries that perpetuate affluent, patriarchal, heterosexist, and unsustainable myths shaping design and contemporary technocultures.

Authors

• Mia Shaw, New York University

• Francisco Castro, New York University

• Kayla DesPortes, New York University

• YoungSoon Takei, Berea College