Towards a Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Challenges in Refugee Re-settlement

Upon arrival to a host community, refugees and asylum seekers face immense challenges to rebuild their social capital that is critical in the process of their resettlement. Developing a holistic understanding of these challenges can provide significant opportunities to inform designers and services providers working with this demography. We adopt the lens of social capital coupled with an inquiry into the heterogeneity of refugees and asylum seekers to gain a holistic understanding of various challenges that they with. We accordingly present a conceptual framework that has been iteratively built based on our four years of engagement with refugee communities. The framework highlights three important aspects: cultural backdrops, displacement-related stressors, and social resources in the host community. We offer several implications for technology design, policies, and the theory of social capital that can support members from these communities in their resettlement.

Designing biomimetic robots: iterative development of an integrated technology design curriculum

In most middle schools, learning is segregated by discipline. Yet interdisciplinary approaches have been shown to cultivate creative thinking, support problem solving, and develop interest while supporting knowledge gains (NAE & NRC in STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research. National Academies Press, Washington, 2014). The Designing Biomimetic Robots project emphasizes problem-based learning to integrate engineering, science, and computational thinking (CT). During a 3 to 4-week unit, students study the natural world to learn how animals accomplish different tasks, then design a robot inspired by what they learned. The project engages students in science, engineering, and CT practices. Over the course of a 3-year project, we used a design-based research approach to: (1) identify and describe strategies and challenges that emerge from integrated curriculum design, (2) explicate how a balance of integrated disciplines can provide opportunities for student participation in science, engineering, and CT practices, and (3) explore how a technology design task can support students’ participation in integrated learning. Data from three focal groups (one from each year of the project) suggest that a focused design task, supported by explicit and targeted supports for science, CT, and engineering practices, led to a student technology design process that was driven by disciplinary understanding. This work highlights the importance of drawing out and prioritizing alignments between disciplines (Barber in Educ Des, 2(8), 2015), to enable integrated learning. Additionally, this work demonstrates how a technology design task can support student learning across disciplines, and how engaging in CT practices can further help students draw these connections.

Responsible Technology Design: Conversations for Success

Digital humanism calls for new technologies that enhance human dignity and autonomy by educating, controlling, or otherwise holding developers responsible. However, this approach to responsible technology design paradoxically depends on the premise that technology is a path to overcoming human limitations while assuming that developers are themselves capable of super-human feats of prognostication. Recognizing developers as subject to human limitations themselves means that responsible technology design cannot be merely a matter of expecting developers to create technology that leads to certain desirable outcomes. Rather, responsible design involves expecting the technologies to be designed in ways that provide for active, meaningful, ongoing conversations between the developer and the technology, between the user and the technology, and between the user and the developer—and expecting that designers and users will commit to engaging in those conversations.

Participatory Design: Apps from The Older Adults to The Older Adults

The use of technology to address health issues among older adults is becoming popular nowadays, but, in practice, there is very little systematic work on how to design and develop for older adults. This paper investigated participatory design in designing and developing two mobile apps to support community-living older adults to maintain their health. We examine 1) three older adults to individually participate in designing an app to self-monitor their fruit, vegetable and liquid intakes and 2) a group of four older adults participate in designing an app to address loneliness. In this paper, we present methodological insights of conducting participatory design with older adults. We focus more on the mutual learning between the researcher and the older adults as “designers”. We found that both methods provide rich data for developing the apps. However, when having a group of older adults together was found to stimulate the discussion among them easily, the participants were more open to critique the design suggestions, the moderator did not have to provoke often to guide the discussion, and in terms of time, although the session was slightly longer, it generates more data per participant. We acknowledge that the topic between the two groups was different, and each topic’s privacy was also a concern. We also acknowledge that the number of participants is low, and the participant’s technology background can be a concern. Either way, we recommend continuing to involve older adults in the technology design and development phase.