Off Into the Sunset: Designing for the Inevitable End of Projects

Abstract: Scholars and designers involved in community-partnered projects, such as research-practice partnerships in the learning sciences, make ethical commitments to the communities and participants that they work with, ideally creating lasting relationships and mutually beneficial outcomes. While there has been work in learning sciences (LS) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for learning on developing and maintaining rapport in project partnerships, these projects inevitably conclude, sometimes abruptly. Many of these projects exist in underserved communities, with researchers proposing educational improvement and advances in the community. When researchers move to the next project, their community partners are sometimes left with useless or, worse, actively detrimental interventions. These community partners can also feel abandoned and used, with little or no ongoing support for quickly obsolete prototypes; while the researchers write up their findings and move on, needing to pursue the next grant or topic of interest in order to stay afloat in the fast-moving academic waters. I believe that while the grand issues of ongoing funding and “publish or perish” are beyond the scope of this work, it is possible to better understand the issues faced in concluding research and develop practical and actionable guidelines for more just and ethical design practices in the inevitable conclusion of a community-partnered project.

In my research, I have explored how we can encourage youth and their communities to take ownership of learning technologies through participatory design and involvement in the technology implementation process. I am currently exploring the long-term impacts of such projects and how the community can take these co-designed technologies for their own, while understanding the resource constraints of both the researchers and communities. My dissertation work will explore how the research project ecosystem can be examined and improved to create a more just and equitable process, specifically examining how to design for the end of the research cycle in an ethical and practical manner, and making the following scholarly contributions: 1. Empirical insights on the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities at the conclusion of a project life cycle; the different manners in which projects conclude; and how community relationships were handled within this scope, through in-depth retrospective case studies as well as interviews with principal investigators, community leaders, and other figures involved in technology implementation projects with communities of learners; 2. Theoretical insights into the ways in which perspectives from the learning sciences can be applied to HCI theoretical lenses, particularly in community projects at the intersection of values and stakeholders; 3. A methodological framework for designing community-partnered research projects that plan for and incorporate the ending of the project, derived from the empirical findings in the previous contributions. Through this work I will explore the dimensions and considerations in ending a project that involves a long-term partnership with a community, developing ways to discuss, navigate, and plan for the closing process and facilitating less unintentionally extractive and more mutually beneficial community research partnerships.

Supervisory Committee:

Committee Co-Chair: Katie Davis, Associate Professor, iSchool
Committee Co-Chair: Jason Yip, Associate Professor, iSchool
GSR: Kara Jackson, Associate Professor, College of Education
Member: Katie Headrick Taylor, Associate Professor, College of Education