I facilitated a session at Mozfest last weekend on Designing Creative Technology Playgrounds for Families. In this session, I invited attendees (anyone who’s been in a family can contribute to this!) to brainstorm and discuss ways we can design creative technology spaces that can support all ages, interests, and expertise in designing and inventing together.

There have already been awesome efforts to support family-friendly spaces such as LAMakerspace and Mothership. The Makerspace team have also developed a Makerspace Playbook with design suggestions and thinking. Tara Tiger Brown who helped start LA Makerspace wrote a great and thoughtful blog post outlining the kinds of needs to support a kid-friendly hackerspace. Once she and her collaborators found a space, she wrote a follow-up blog post describing their journey and the new space.

The session actually started before the slotted Sunday afternoon time. When I was talking through my session with Michelle Thorne (the super awesome organizer of Mozfest!), she encouraged me to hack the event space in Ravensbourne. I then brought along a long piece of butcher paper across the Atlantic and posted it along one wall. I asked people to answer the question: “How can we design hackerspaces for families?”

It was a great way to get asynchronous participation during Mozfest, to help me prepare, and to seed the conversations for the actual session. For example, while I was observing people respond and discuss the question around the poster, one mom asked her daughter to explain the meaning of hackerspace. I realized that “hackerspace” and “hacker” might evoke different definitions across many backgrounds. This observation informed one of the first activities of the session.

Among the attendees, we had a great group of people at various stages trying to answer that question. Some people came because they were curious about the topic, some wanted to start family-friendly spaces, and others already had hackerspaces/makerspaces that were kid-friendly, but they wanted to make it inviting to the whole family.

Before jumping into the brainstorming at the start of the session, I decided to surface people’s definitions of hackerspace first, by asking attendees to write words, images, and phrases that come to mind when they think of hackerspace.

Some themes that came up that people used to describe a hackerspace:

• Making, inventing, creating
• Magic, fun
• Tools and skills
• Place, sandbox
• Intimidating, scary for newcomers

This surfacing was useful in motivating the rest of the discussion. How can we design a creative technology space that enables people to design, invent, and experience the magic and fun of making, connecting, and sharing? How can we make sure that this space is inviting, inclusive, and supportive for not just people who are already inclined to design and invent, but to those who are new or unfamiliar with making?

In the next activity, I asked everyone to think about what such a space would need. After many colorful post-its, we decided to drill down on three themes that emerged:

• How can we design meaningful activities to engage all members of a family in creative learning experiences?
• What would the space require to support the needs of making and the needs of families (which can include many ages, interests, backgrounds, and dynamics)?
• How do you build a community to participate, contribute, and manage the space?

Our group came up with lots of great ideas. (Check out our written notes.) One theme that came out of the smaller group discussions was including communities and families in the design and planning of the space. People emphasized the importance of incorporating the needs of local communities into account, rather than prescribing the entire space and experience. However, designers must balance supporting what the community wants and encouraging serendipity, or being open to new experiences. Childcare also popped up in conversations (and post-its) as well as making the space and tools safe. Other ideas included designing activities that used themes to invite a variety of interests and styles, such as food hacking or holidays.

Just as ideas were generated, so were lots of questions. In designing activities, how can we support meaningful and equitable participation? What activities can enable kids to be the facilitators and experts rather than just the adults? How can family-friendly activities be challenging and engaging for adults too? What can we learn from dynamics in other settings such as the home, classrooms, playgrounds, and schools?

There’s definitely more to be discussed around this topic and our conversations helped us all get started. I hope to follow many of the efforts of people who attended as well as look at the possibilites here in the Boston area. If you’re interested in talking more, please contact me or leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Lately, there have been many conversations about brogrammers, fratty programmers who are hard-core at parties, at the gym, and at the computer. (See more definitions from Urban Dictionary or Quora.) The simplest one defined a brogrammer as a programmer who’s a “bro.” Many of the conversations have centered around the sexist posturing and messages from companies and other computing groups that assert this image – some examples objectify women in their recruitment strategies. These uses of “Brogrammers” highlight the ongoing problems in many computing environments, which can have cultures that are hostile and unwelcoming to women and other minorities. GeekFeminism even keeps a timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities.

I sympathize though with the energy to want to create your own image of being a programmer, one that defies the dominant and unappealing stereotype of the myopic and isolated programmer. I can speak to it from my own experiences when I was an computer science undergraduate.

Like many computer science programs, mine had few women, and it was hard to find people with similar interests. It was also hard to connect with people, when very few people were outgoing to begin with. It was a very isolating experience, especially in the beginning of my program when I was still trying to build a support network away from the one I left 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

I luckily found a supportive group of women and men in my program. We not only went through all the ups and downs of classes and projects together, but also built lively personal and social lives together. We had this shared energy to defy stereotypes and express how social, how fun, and how proud we were to be computer science students. We even created a name for our social group, “Girls-Gone-Six,” a play on Girls Gone Wild and the official department number “6″ assigned to Computer Science at MIT. We made a mailing list and even designed a t-shirt. We wanted to show that we could be sexy and smart – and we created an image of that ourselves through this group identity. I’ve seen other examples of women and men trying to assert identities and/or reclaim words. I ran into one that reclaims brogrammers. Beyond computing, I found a group responding to attacks on people who use birth control: “Sluts Across America” have tried to redefine the word “slut.”

Some hefty cultural and institutional changes are necessary to address these ongoing issues in computing environments – and I think the denial of some groups in seeing the sexism in these brogramming incidents only illustrate how deep this problem runs. Change is possible, as some computing departments such as Harvey Mudd have shown. I hope this increased media attention around gender issues bring about productive conversations and strengthen efforts to enact change. Because building an inclusive, respectful and supportive environment can only benefit everyone.

Some of the original members of Girls Gone Six group about to get our computer science degrees from MIT

I recently re-read Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete by Seymour Papert and Sherry Turkle. All together I’ve read it three times now – and each time I’ve gotten something different out of it depending on where I was in my life.

Here is the first blurb from the article:

The concerns that fuel the discussion of women and computers are best served by talking about more than women and more than computers. Women’s access to science and engineering has historically been blocked by prejudice and discrimination. Here we address sources of exclusion determined not by rules that keep women out, but by ways of thinking that make them reluctant to join in. Our central thesis is that equal access to even the most basic elements of computation requires an epistemological pluralism, accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking.

The first time I read this article was in 2007 and I was about to complete my M.Eng. in Computer Science at MIT – ready to leave my college life for a professional one in software development. I remember it was a mind-blowing experience for me. My biggest takeaway from the first read was: how I think and do things is valuable and I don’t necessarily have to adapt to the dominant ways of thinking and doing things. In some ways, this seems like a no-brainer – but for me I had just spent 5 years being “disciplined” to think and do things the “right” way at my MIT computer science program. Five years being told to build software this way, design algorithms that way, etc. It was an empowering experience for me and it was something I wish I encountered earlier. How much of my own thinking changed and evolved – what was gained and lost along the way?

My second read was back in 2010 as a first year graduate student at the Media Lab in Mitch Resnick’s (my advisor) and Sherry Turkle’s course Technologies for Creative Learning. I had volunteered to facilitate a class session where Epistemological Pluralism was one of the primary readings. Because I was a facilitator, my frame of mind at that time was: “How can I engage my classmates in this reading? How can help them appreciate the key points of the article?” Together with two other classmates who also volunteered to facilitate, we developed an activity where everyone drew a monster, wrote instructions on how to draw their monsters, and exchanged those instructions with another classmate. It was fun to see my peers try to draw each other’s monsters, relying purely on textual description. We wanted them to see and share different ways and strategies — each of them effective in different ways.

My third read was last week, and this time I looked closely at how they talked about gender and styles of thinking and doing. As I continue to study and research gender participation in computing, I have found it increasingly difficult to talk about gender. One of the difficulties I run into is trying to talk about women without essentializing them or making simplistic statements that are counterproductive. In Epistemological Pluralism, they talk about two styles of knowing, which they’ve called “hard” and “soft.” “Hard” refers to logical and abstract approaches, whereas “soft” refers to flexible and concrete approaches to knowing and doing. They emphasize that these are ideal types and people fall within a spectrum between these two extremes. However, in their analysis of adult and child programmers, when people were left to explore programming without prescriptions of the “right” way to do things, they found that men typically used “hard” approaches while women used “soft” approaches. In my re-reading, it was interesting for me to reflect more on their analysis — they didn’t necessarily begin looking at men and women in particular, but these styles and their gendered trends emerged in their interviews and observations of many people across different settings. Papert and Turkle also took care to point out that their arguments are not about gender per se, but about how supporting multiple ways of doing and thinking is necessary to encourage people of various backgrounds to participate in computing.

What we say in this chapter about gender, programming, and intellectual style is based on the analysis of these cases. But we believe that what is most important is not any statistical association between gender and programming styles, but what lies behind the styles and behind the resistance of our intellectual culture to recognize and facilitate them both. In our culture, those who use hard approaches don’t simply share a style, they constitute an epistemological elite.

I recently decided to catch up on some young adult pop culture and I escaped into the Hunger Games book trilogy. Gotta keep up my the audiences I engage with! It’s also been all over my twitter feed from other academics I follow. The Hunger Games trilogy follows a young woman Katniss Everdeen living in a dystopian society where a totalitarian government reigns over 12 districts surrounding one capital. Every year, each district must send one boy and one girl to fight to the death in the Hunger Games, which is presented as an extreme reality tv show. I read the three books in four nights! It really is a page-turner (or page-swiper if you’re using an iPad).

One thing I found exciting about the books is how it features a strong female lead as the heorine. When the story begins, 16-year old Katniss is shown as a hunter, using her kills to feed her family and trade for other necessities. While there is the standard love triangle, it’s not central to the plot and it doesn’t define the development of her character. After the Hunger Games, she engages in the deadly games that adults implicitly play against each other and becomes the face of the districts’ rebellion against the capital. Reading about Katniss, I’m reminded of my experience watching Miss Representation, a documentary that highlighted the lack of positive and strong representations of women in media. Since then, I’ve become more sensitive to what roles women have and how they are portrayed. And it’s exciting to see a series this popular featuring a strong female lead, especially since the Twilight franchise featured such a one-dimensional and weak character in Bella. Bleh!

There were also some complex themes in the book that include survival, trauma, war, truthiness and how it’s characters cope with such experiences. I found a neat post explaining the uses and lack of uses of technology in the book and how it reflects the values of that society. I wonder how these themes are appreciated across its audiences. One shocking bit of news from fans who watched the recently released movie on the first book shows me that some people really didn’t get it (and in this case, what did they get?).

Getting lost in reading these books, I remembered how much I love reading fiction! Since coming back to graduate school, I have been mostly reading research papers and academic books. It was refreshing and a nice reminder of something that I love to do – I’m going to try to make room for it again once thesis writing is done.

I went to the Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco earlier this month. It feels like such a long time ago already, but I’ve been busy trying to catch up having been gone for two weeks. Like the other conferences I attended in February, I took lots of things away from DML and I’m still mulling them over. I’m going to discuss two themes from the conference in this post (for thoughts from other conference attendees, check out the shared conference notes).

Fostering parent engagement

I’ve only been to one DML conference before this one, but there seemed to be more educators present in this year’s DML. (DML is a fairly new conference – this was the third iteration.) Also present were many researchers, designers, outreach coordinators, representatives from many organizations, and students (not graduate students, but high school students as co-designers and co-researchers). Many disciplines and inter-disciplines were present as well. Such a diversity of a participants is what I love about the DML community. Often conferences are differentiated according to practices or fields and I don’t often seen practitioners, researchers, designers, and even students connecting, collaborating, and sharing ideas.

However, there was one important group missing in the discussion: parents! There was one session that discussed outreach to families, which I was unfortunately unable to attend because it was full. Parents were brought up a number of times, especially during Q/A of the larger sessions. Why was there a lack of parent or family outreach representation and research? Such a question was posed in one session that included Connie Yowell from MacArthur. I liked how Connie responded: instead of taking on activities that regulate and monitor their kids’ digital media activity, parents should become a part of the participatory cultures that their kids engage in.

I was excited to hear discussions about parents and family engagement, especially since I’ve been trying to start a new project around family outreach. So far I’m calling them Family Scratch Nights – more on that in a future post.

The politics and paradoxes of inclusion

I attended a provocative session at the very end called The Politics and Paradoxes of Inclusion, which was on the last day in the last session of the conference. Moderated by danah boyd, it explored the challenges, contradictions, and complexities within environments, such as pubic schools and online settings, that mean to be inclusive and welcoming of all backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. However, there are power dynamics and some values and agendas are prioritized. Such prioritization can unknowingly benefit some groups over others, sometimes hurting the groups an organization means to support in the first place. Antero Garcia shared his students’ experiences in the public school he teaches in South Central LA. For example, through school policies to stop cell phone usage during class hours, the school takes power away from his students as students lose a significant source of connection and communication with their peers. Christo Sims shared his research studying the diverse youth cultures in a New York City middle school and how more empowered parents behind one youth culture can disempower students from other youth cultures.

This is one sessions that I am still mulling over, but I had strong reactions from what was discussed (and Q/A was especially heated in this session) that I’m still trying to articulate. Like the illusions and contradictions of meritocracy, this session raised awareness around the complexities of inclusion and how being blind to such complexities can be harmful. However, there was little discussion beyond building awareness. danah brought the presentations together by provoking us to think about the environments we’re in: Who has power and who do they have power over? Who sets the agenda? What are the valued interests? Who is being included and who is being excluded?

I’ll leave you to mull things over and encourage you to read the session description for more framing.

During CSCW, I had an opportunity to chat with ethnographer Dave Randall, who said over lunch that ethnography is not a research method as much as it is a way of thinking and viewing the world. I hadn’t heard that sort of description of ethnography before and I was extremely curious when I came to the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania for the Ethnography in Education conference. This year’s theme was “Digital Discourses” and the conference explored how learning, teaching, and researching are evolving as digital tools pervade the many spaces of our lives (e.g. home, school, friends, etc.).

Together with Joanna Siegal, David Low, and Yasmin Kafai, we presented some of our preliminary work studying role playing game (RPG) groups in the Scratch Online Community. Joanna, David, and I provided different lens to understand this quirky but large phenomena in Scratch. Galleries on the Scratch website were designed to allow members to collect projects under one page. Members can write a description for the gallery and also engage in comments below the projects. Some members have appropriated this space to engage in role playing! Members create characters and role play dialog, interaction, and narrative development comment by comment in the gallery. As a designer, I looked at how members appropriated the website and the Scratch programming environment to dive into their interests. As a linguist, Joanna looked carefully at their discursive practices and David, with his new media background, looked at their visual practices in their Scratch projects. At the end of our presentations, Yasmin asked us to reflect on what we each learned, especially since we came to it from different perspectives. Reflecting on our process, I couldn’t help thinking of the designer as an ethnographer and the ethnographer as a designer.

It was interesting to come to this conference with my designer hat on — there was not so much discussion about tools and devices as much as how people experienced them, learned from them, and adapted their research practices to better study and use them in learning environments. And because this was a conference on a particular research method, there was a lot of talk around process, the challenges and decision making to develop our research. One of my favorite formats in the conference was called “data analysis consultation”, where researchers were given 5 minutes to explain their ongoing work, explain their challenges, and share some sample data. Then for the next 30 minutes, other researchers provide constructive feedback. As some people already know, I’m a big fan of reflection(!). And there was lots of it in this format and the conference overall — and not just on process but also as researchers. During the Friday evening keynote, UPenn Professor John Jackson Jr. called on participants to be self-reflective and think about the implications of every move and decision ethnographers make.

This theme of reflexivity also emerged while I was CSCW, especially at the HCI4D workshop I sat in. Researchers at this workshop talked at length about the importance of reflexivity as designers and developers, challenging each other to think about where they were designing from (in addition to who they were designing for and for what). I think as researchers and designers, our own biases and values can be reflected in the decisions we make in our work. And if we are designing for or with and researching groups we are not a part of, I think this reflective practice is even more important to do good design and research.

Looking at our own research project and sitting in on others, I saw some similarities in what methods ethnographers use to understand communities and cultures, especially with this conference’s theme around the evolving technological landscape. As designers, it’s important to develop intuitions and understandings about who we are designing for – and to do that we may conduct interviews or spend time “in the field” observing people. We develop theories or understandings about what we are seeing and how we might implement new solutions to address needs/challenges. From the conference, I also saw some ethnographic practices that connected to the practices of co-design. Like how co-design involves the “users” into the design and development of tools, some ethnographers would share their notes and data with their participants – validating what researchers were finding about their participants with their participants. I believe that these practices were from feminist ethnography (correct me if I’m wrong!), which connected with what I had recently read about feminist HCI! It was neat to see ideas I am currently learning connecting across these spaces of research (Ethnography Forum) and design (CSCW).

This past week I attended Computer Supported Cooperative Work, a conference on the design and study of technologies that support groups, communities, and organizations. It was my first time and, in addition to being an attendee, I was also a Student Volunteer. I have lots to reflect on, but thought I would share my thoughts in bits and pieces. For this post, I’ll share my experience sitting in the HCI4D workshop called Learning from Marginalized Users: Reciprocity in HCI4D (go here for papers). In the workshop format, you must typically submit a position paper in order to attend, but as a student volunteer, I was able to sit in for a few hours.

Before this workshop, I had a skewed and narrow perception of what HCI4D and ICT4D meant. The “D” for development made me think that initiatives and technologies focused only in developing nations. However, I heard many presentations from attendees that had broad contexts and applications of technology, some within the US: remote parenting among migrant Jamaican families, social media use by urban homeless, and online technology use by community outreach workers. I think even some of the presenters were unsure about the scope and reach of these acronyms in terms of for who and for what purpose. One presenter began by saying “I don’t know if my users’ are marginal.” Another researcher gradually discovered the tone of advocacy in her research as she shared and discussed her work with the other attendees. A later discussion raised a question among researchers: when developing tools/experiences, people talk about who you are designing for, what you are creating, and for what goals, however, designers can also discuss this question: “where are you designing from?”

The workshop ended with larger questions around the meaning of HCI4D or ICT4D. Generally, attendees were unhappy with the acronym. Not all the work that was shared necessarily fell under HCI or ICT or 4 or D. Even in the workshop’s title, attendees questioned the appropriateness of “marginalized” versus “at the margins.” “Marginalized” implied that someone/something was acting on a group of people, disenfranchising them in some way. Their discussion on wording and acronym choices echoes some of my own struggles in word choices around “disadvantaged”, “underserved”, and “underprivileged” – words that you often see in educational outreach initiatives. Do the groups being marked as “marginalized” or “disadvantaged” see themselves as marginalized or disadvantaged? These are not the best words, but they can send a signal to pay attention to them. What other words or descriptors are more appropriate without ignoring differences or making assumptions on power and place?

Together with students from the Media Lab, ACT and CMS communities, I had the opportunity to help organize the Festival of Learning. It is a two-day festival from January 27-28 for members (includes students, faculty, and staff) to learn, teach, and share topics/experiences/skills they are passionate about. There was such a eclectic mix of sessions: Research Methodology 101, South Asian Fighter Kites, an Armchair Tour through Physics, Cardboard Forts, Settlers of Catan, MMORPGs - so much! It was a wonderful event full of awesomeness and, in general, a great time to connect, create, and collaborate with people in these communities.

There’s so much to reflect on! At the end of each night, our organizing team did our Red, Yellow, Greens – a structure for reflection that I’ve used with children and adults to reflect on experiences (and borrowed from an outreach program I used to work with). It’s a great way to elicit feedback and thoughts: Green = awesome, Yellow = okay, not great, meh, Red = definitely needs to change, not a good experience. With such a thoughtful group, we had great discussions about not only ways to iterate and improve the event, but also discussed what values and goals are behind it. It was certainly a lot to discuss on little sleep these past two days, but we will continue to discuss and develop these values and goals.

There are lots of goodies to mull over – here are some personal reflections on these last two days and from our discussions:

Building community. How can we build a learning community, a culture of learning? One opportunity that this festival provides is a structure for people to share their interests with others, whether that is a workshop on CAD or an experiential learning environment such as the Joy of Listening on Repeat. By sharing and learning from one another on topics they’re passionate about, members can connect with each other on a more personal and nourishing way and develop new and existing relationships beyond this experience (at least that’s the hope). One thing that can be easy to forget in a research lab is that we are also a learning environment. Faculty members are not only Principal Investigators, but also advisors, mentors, and learners. Research assistants are also students developing their practice and vision. It was great to have our Media Lab director Joi Ito participate and lead his own session together with another student Misha Sra on MMORPGs. While students primarily participated and led sessions, we also had a couple of faculty members and support staff participate and lead sessions in multiple ways. However, there’s still areas to improve here. Some people came just  to attend or lead specific sessions. Some even came just for the food. Some did not really engage in the social events and kept to themselves. Is it really possible for participants to feel part of something larger if they only stay for a small bit or hardly engage with others? If the answer is no, what can we do? Or is there something we can do?

Creating and transforming spaces. We took over most of the Media Lab to hold this event, especially the new (and still largely pristine) Media Lab building. One conference room was even filled with balloons! (Didn’t think I would ever experience something like that.)  We were lucky to have a visiting professor Scott Nicholson surprise us at the last minute and provide face painting for both days. At lunch and at the end of the day, we laid picnic blankets out on our third floor atrium, covering the monotonous floor with color and patterns. We wanted to create spaces that were open to play and that were supportive for learning and connecting. In transforming our spaces and even our faces, I hope that people who attended also had transformative experiences.

Ways of learning and teaching. Being on support duty through the two days, I was not able to attend most of the sessions, but one question I was left with at the end was what kinds of learning and teaching emerged at the Festival. I think we saw some traditional forms where one person was up front delivering ideas followed by group discussion, but there was also some construction, some play, and some unstructured experiences. Were participants able to try out new ways of teaching and learning?

Reflecting as learning. We ended each day by bringing everyone together again for snacks and reflection. We hoped that people would share their experiences either teaching or learning through the day and prepare some thoughts to share with the larger group. On the first day, the group was small enough that we sat in a circle of about 20 people and shared some quick thoughts on each session. On the second day, we provided post-its and flip cams and encouraged people to write on our reflection wall. While everyone generally participated, I was not sure if people were just humoring us or actually able to reflect. I believe reflecting is a part of learning. What spaces, activities, or experiences can we provide to help people reflect? Should we leave them be to be by themselves? Can reflection be a social and open experience as we tried to do during the event?

Things hardly go as planned. As a planner type, planning for all possible scenarios and boundary conditions, it was useful for me to see how we adapted to unanticipated events or took advantage of serendipity. It was great to see that while things hardly go as planned, it will be okay and might even be better than anticipated.

To end, here are two fun summary videos created by Michelle Chung together with our awesome documentation team.

I am grateful to have helped with this event. It was a great learning experience for me as well. Thanks to the organizing team, especially Nathan Matias for envisioning and leading this event. And thank you to everyone who participated!

My last few posts have been article or paper referrals. I think I’m at a place right now where I have less time to think and write deeply — that or I’m not setting aside the time to read, reflect, and write about this blog’s topic!

I have another article referral for this week: an interview with Nicholas Negroponte about the One Laptop Per Child program. The title says it all: “I want to give poor children computers and walk away.”

I remember seeing this on my Twitter feed and immediately feeling uneasy about it. With this title, a new image of the program emerged for me – one that is paternalistic and condescending. My continuing issue with OLPC (or at least the way its leader can often describe it) is its blatant disregard of others (such as parents, teachers, and mentors) and narrow focus on the child. While parents, family members, or educators may not be technical experts, with skills and knowledge to answer a child’s questions about computers, they can offer valuable support and encouragement for the child as a learner. It is also important that households and communities support a computing culture that values use and time with computers. I am more interested to learn how OLPC cultivates computing cultures in communities that are technology-poor in human capital and resources. I feel that they are relying too much on the design on the computer (which is a well-designed computing device) as a cure-all. However, computing tools come and go – what is really sustainable is an empowered community that values and understands the importance of continually providing quality education for its young people and other members of the community.