Designing With Communities: Participatory Methods Across Technologies, Learning, and Everyday Life

About this event

Participatory design (PD) offers a methodological approach for bringing community expertise, experiences, and priorities into research and design. Yet much of the methodological and relational work that makes meaningful participation possible remains invisible, including negotiating priorities, integrating disciplinary knowledge and community, and adapting research processes to different communities and contexts. In this talk, Dr. Anderson-Coto explore participatory design as an interdisciplinary research methodology and its applications within education. Drawing on projects spanning youth AI literacy, early childhood STEM and literacy, and playful learning in community and healthcare settings, she examines how participatory approaches inform research questions, design decisions, and understandings of people's everyday practices. Through these examples, she highlights the opportunities and challenges of designing with communities and consider how participatory design can support the generation of situated knowledge and meaningful learning experiences across disciplinary boundaries.