Publications

For immigrants, language preservation is crucial to maintain their identity, but the process of immigration can put a strain on a community’s ability to do so. We interviewed eight Nepali immigrants to understand barriers to language preservation across sociopolitical contexts in Nepal and immigrant life in the United States. Participants described strong motivation but limited institutional support, time and resource constraints, and English-dominant environments that widen parent-child language gaps. They envisioned technology that supports interactive, family centered learning. In response, we are developing an audio-first, point-and-click language learning game based on the theory of comprehensible input, designed for parent-child co-playing. An early evaluation with four design experts reveals promising gameplay, and the need to simplify symbol-heavy UI. We conclude with implications for designing language technologies that support preservation through relations while acknowledging the limits of design.

Entrepreneurs in resource-constrained communities often lack time and support to translate ideas into actionable business plans. While generative AI promises assistance, most systems assume high digital literacy and overlook community infrastructures that shape adoption. We report on the community-centered design and deployment of BizChat, an AI-powered business planning tool, introduced across four workshops at a feminist makerspace in Pittsburgh. Through log data (N=30) and interviews (N=10), we examine how entrepreneurs build resilience through collective AI literacy development—encompassing adoption, adaptation, and refusal of AI. Our findings reveal that while BizChat lowered barriers to accessing capital by translating ideas into “business language,” this ease raised questions about whether instant AI outputs undermine sensemaking essential to planning. We show how peer support and community-centered deployment shape resilient AI literacies in entrepreneurial ecosystems.

When conducting research in community-based settings, it is natural for conflict to arise as the practices, motivations, and imaginaries of researchers and local stakeholders converge. As designers, the question, then, is: “In what ways can we engage with conflict to arrive at constructive outcomes?” In this paper, we employ ethnography and a mapping workshop with an environmental research group facing conflicts at a contested ecological site. We unpack some of the ways in which local conflicts over data, mapping, and technologies around community-managed forests are intertwined with broader socio-political, historical, and value-based contestations. We find that conflict serves as a critical site for negotiating community engagement and configuring collaboration. Accordingly, we provide strategies for surfacing, navigating, and staying with conflict in contested settings. For community-based researchers, this requires resisting the natural tendency to seek an immediate resolution to the conflict, thereby creating room to deepen attachments to matters of concern.

While conversations around the future of education focus on AI, robots, and VR, they often overlook how children imagine futures within their own educational worlds. We conducted participatory speculative design workshops with 92 students (ages 12–14) in two contrasting settings: an autonomy-oriented international school in Finland and an exam-driven, high-stakes public school in India. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that pedagogical ecologies, rather than national cultures, shaped children’s technological imaginaries and future orientations. Students in Finland envisioned pragmatic, technologically advanced, yet human-centered classrooms, whereas students in India prioritized curricular choice, emotional safety, and systemic fairness. In the workshops in India, we observed that speculative possibilities expanded with careful scaffolding but remained tethered to current realities when scaffolding was disrupted. We argue for “plural design futuring” grounded in children’s lived experiences and contribute methodological insights into scaffolding as a critical condition for participatory future-making.

Background and Context. Computing is considered a fundamental skill for civic engagement, self-expression, and employment opportunity. Despite this, there exist significant equity gaps in post-secondary computing enrollment and retention. Specifically, in the California State University (CSU) system, which serves close to half a million undergraduate students, students identifying as Hispanic/Latino make up a smaller percentage of CS majors than expected from the state’s overall population; and, once enrolled, tend to leave the CS major at higher rates than other students. Purpose. We report on the impacts of a curricular intervention aimed at strengthening the sense of belonging of Hispanic/Latino students in computing, with the eventual goal of improving retention in computing majors for those students. Methods. Working in an alliance of six universities within the CSU (five of which are designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions), we have incorporated socially responsible computing across early CS courses. We aim for alignment between our curriculum and students’ communal goal orientations, and for coursework that attends to students’ interests, values, and cultural assets. Over a two-year-long study, we collected survey data to learn about the impact of our curricular intervention on students’ sense of belonging and perceived learning and agency. Findings. We found that students generally reported high communal goal orientations and, at the campuses without competitive enrollment policies, our intervention had a significant positive impact on students’ senses of belonging. Implications. Our data suggest positive outcomes for integrating socially responsible computing into early CS courses, especially for Hispanic/Latino students at certain Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs).

Community-based design efforts rightly seek to reduce the power differences between researchers and community participants by aligning with community values and furthering their priorities. However, what should designers do when key community members’ practices seem to enact an oppressive and harmful structure? We reflect on our two-year-long engagement with a non-profit organization in southern India that supports women subjected to domestic abuse or facing mental health crises. We highlight the organizational gaps in knowledge management and transfer, which became an avenue for our design intervention. During design, we encountered practices that upheld caste hierarchies. These practices were expected to be incorporated into our technology. Anticipating harms to indirect stakeholders, we resisted this incorporation. It led to a breakdown in our relationship with the partner organization. Reflecting on this experience, we outline pluralistic pathways that community-based designers might inhabit when navigating value conflicts. These include making space for reflection before and during engagements, strategically repositioning through role reframing or appreciative inquiry, and exiting the engagement if necessary.

Social media platforms have transformed global communication and interaction, with TikTok emerging as a critical tool for education, connection, and social impact, including in contexts where infrastructural resources are limited. Amid growing political discussions about banning platforms like TikTok, such actions can create significant ripple effects, particularly impacting marginalized communities. We present a study on Nepal, where a TikTok ban was recently imposed and lifted. As a low-resource country in transition where digital communication is rapidly evolving, TikTok enables a space for community engagement and cultural expression. In this context, we conducted an online survey (N=108) to explore user values, experiences, and strategies for navigating online spaces post-ban. By examining these transitions, we aim to improve our understanding of how digital technologies, policy responses, and cultural dynamics interact globally and their implications for governance and societal norms. Our results indicate that users express skepticism toward platform bans but often passively accept them without active opposition. Findings suggest the importance of institutionalizing collective governance models that encourage public deliberation, nuanced control, and socially resonant policy decisions.

Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) education entails the infusion of Computer Science (CS) education with interwoven attention to ethical, social, and political issues to position students to reflect and take action individually and collaboratively to create a more just world. Our approach to SRC supports students to explore computing design/development in early CS courses with a communal goal orientation (in contrast to agentic/individualized), shown to improve achievement and retention for students with identities that are minoritized in CS. Grounded in our own experiences as co-developers and implementers of this pedagogical transformation and as co-facilitators of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) across six minority-serving institutions in California, we share how we use an iterative design and implementation process modeled from social design experimentation as research and development method. Initial results are presented as a set of promising practices for incorporating SRC into introductory CS courses.

Methodological considerations for surfacing and addressing conflicts in participatory design.

The growing trend of artificial intelligence (AI) as a solution to social and technical problems reinforces AI Realism—the belief that AI is an inevitable and natural order. In response, this paper argues that participatory design (PD), with its focus on democratic values and processes, can play a role in questioning and resisting AI Realism. I examine three concerning aspects of AI Realism: the facade of democratization that lacks true empowerment, demands for human adaptability in contrast to AI systems’ inflexibility, and the obfuscation of essential human labor enabling the AI system. I propose resisting AI Realism by reconfiguring PD to continue engaging with value-centered visions, increasing its exploration of non-AI alternatives, and making the essential human labor underpinning AI systems visible. I position PD as a means to generate friction against AI Realism and open space for alternative futures centered on human needs and values.

Challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals in the United States raise questions about our society’s ability to truly provide second chances. This paper presents the outcomes of our ongoing collaboration with a non-profit organization dedicated to reentry support. We highlight the multifaceted challenges individuals face during their reentry journey, including support programs that prioritize supervision over service, unresponsive support systems, limited access to resources, financial struggles exacerbated by restricted employment opportunities, and technological barriers. In the face of such complex social challenges, our work aims to facilitate our partner organization’s ongoing efforts to promote digital literacy through a web application that is integrated into their existing processes. We share initial feedback from the stakeholders, draw out four implications: supporting continuity of care, promoting reflection through slow technology, building in flexibility, and reconfiguring toward existing infrastructure, and conclude with a reflection on our role as partners on the side.

Examines the relationship between computing education, capitalism, and social structures.

Integrating socially responsible computing into an introductory CS course.

A validated dataset for rating image captions.

Monolingual ideology prevails in technology. It is further dominated by the English language. The problem arising from monolingual ideology in technology is pronounced for individuals with limited digital literacy and English familiarity. We present a case study of two pairs of first-generation migrants and their children who completed a series of web and mobile-based tasks in their home language, English, and a different language. We highlight the various roles the children played in helping their parents use technology and the ways in which the pairs moved between languages to seek and provide help. We make a case to move away from monolingual ideologies in technology towards translanguaging, taking into account the rich language repository available to bilingual and multilingual users. We conclude by drawing three design considerations to nurture translanguaging practices.

An assets-based approach to understanding student mothers’ technology use.

Exploring different approaches to assets-based design in HCI.

A conversation on critical perspectives on asset-based community development.

Participatory Design (PD) seeks political change to support people’s democratic control over processes, solutions, and, in general, matters of concern to them. A particular challenge remains in supporting vulnerable groups to gain power and control when they are dependent on organizations and external structures. We reflect on our five-year engagement with survivors of sex trafficking in Nepal and an anti-trafficking organization that supports the survivors. Arguing that the prevalence of deficit perspective in the setting promotes dependency and robs the survivors’ agency, we sought to bring change by exploring possibilities based on the survivors’ existing assets. Three configurations illuminate how our design decisions and collective exploration operate to empower participation while attending to the substantial power implicitly and explicitly manifest in existing structures. We highlight the challenges we faced, uncovering actions that PD practitioners can take, including an emphasis on collaborative entanglements, attending to contingent factors, and encouraging provisional collectives.

Download paper here

The field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has long recognized a socio-technical gap complicating the design of technologies that can sustainably meet social needs. In response, a growing body of research advocates for assets-based design, an approach that seeks to build upon what the individuals and community already have. The emphasis on positioning assets rather than needs at the center of the process can complicate designers’ decisions on what activities to foster, how to conduct them, and what outcomes to expect. In this paper, we reflect on two different assets-based design endeavors with vulnerable populations. Our reflections present assets-based design as an ongoing process that prioritizes the formation and evolution of a collective of assets-based thinkers who continually learn about their assets and ways to use them to attain desirable change. From that reflection, we contribute three methodological commitments for assets-based design to the growing CSCW scholarship on supporting vulnerable communities to attain emancipatory transformations: (1) embedding trust-building elements throughout the journey; (2) facilitating the formation of an interdependent collective; and (3) making moves towards incremental transformations. Further, we contribute a discussion on the change of perspective that entails for researchers and designers interested in undertaking assets-based design. In particular, we underscore the need to recognize the value of work before the work, to see technology as an intermediary rather than an inevitable end, and embrace impact in the shape of slow incremental transformation.

Download paper here

A recorded presentation can be seen here

How might computer scientists work with communities in facilitating meaningful social change? In this project, we make a case for an approach that builds upon what the individuals and community already have—their assets—rather than emphasizing “user’s needs” as typically postulated by human-centered design. We present details of our four-year-long assets-based engagement with an anti-trafficking organization in Nepal and the sex trafficking survivors supported by the organization. We explored the potential role that socio-technical systems and technology designers can play in assisting the survivors to build on their existing assets towards their vision of “dignified reintegration”. The research involves three fieldwork and a remote study, each one leveraging carefully tailored socio-technical systems to investigate a design proposition. We present an operationalizable definition of assets and a framework of action to leverage assets in realizing change at an individual and institutional level. We describe the conditions that influenced the possibilities for our interventions and the factors that guided the design of the socio-technical systems. We further highlight how we adapted our methods to the local resources and practices in order to foster a space that promoted comfort and control to the study participants. The detailed account of our approach aims to provide a justification for undertaking slow, incremental steps with the community.

A copy of the dissertation can be accessed here

A recording of the final presentation can be seen here

A PDF version of the slide deck that I used for the final presentation can be accessed here

Managing tensions in expert-led crowdsourced investigations.

Guided by a human-centered design focus on users’ needs, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) research and practice have increasingly explored how to address the multiple inequities affecting historically marginalized groups. A growing body of CSCW and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, building upon education and community development literature, argues that centering on needs dismisses marginalized users’ capacity for driving change. Needs-based views often lead to designs for the “here and now,” further marginalizing populations and perpetuating stereotypes. In contrast, an assets-based approach that puts users’ knowledge, strengths, and capacities—assets—at the core of design can better promote sustained impact. Translating assets into meaningful designs that interact with intersecting systems of oppression, however, raises critical questions: What are assets? Whose assets are privileged? What ethical considerations surface when facilitating assets-based reflections? How can an assets-based design tackle systems-level problems? In this workshop, we will bring together researchers and industry actors to explore the implications of assets-based perspectives across domains, including Education, Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), and Participatory Design (PD). Specifically, we will work to develop guidelines and methodologies for CSCW researchers and designers to identify when and how to pursue an assets-based approach, navigating issues of power to translate assets into design effectively.

Download paper here

Participatory Design’s vision of democratic participation assumes participants’ feelings of agency in envisioning a collective future. But this assumption may be leaky when dealing with vulnerable populations. We reflect on the results of a series of activities aimed at supporting agentic-future-envisionment with a group of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal. We observed a growing sense among the survivors that they could play a role in bringing about change in their families. They also became aware of how they could interact with available institutional resources. Reflecting on the observations, we argue that building participant agency on the small and personal interactions is necessary before demanding larger Political participation. In particular, a value of PD, especially for vulnerable populations, can lie in the process itself if it helps participants position themselves as actors in the larger world.

Download paper here

A recorded presentation can be seen here

In Nepal, sex-trafficking survivors and the organizations that support them have limited resources to assist the survivors in their ongoing journey towards reintegration. We take an asset-based approach wherein we identify and build on the strengths possessed by such groups. In this work, we present reflections from introducing a voice-annotated web application to a group of survivors. The web application tapped into and built upon two elements of pre-existing strengths possessed by the survivors — the social bond between them and knowledge of crafting as taught to them by the organization. Our findings provide insight into the array of factors influencing how the survivors act in relation to one another as they created novel use practices and adapted the technology. Experience with the application seemed to open knowledge of computing as a potential source of strength. Finally, we articulate three design desiderata that could help promote communal spaces: make activity perceptible to the group, create appropriable steps, and build in fun choices.

Download paper here

A recorded presentation can be seen here

We present reflections based on qualitative analysis of data from the CHEM+C Project which promotes computational thinking (CT) in classrooms through integration with science classes. The curriculum utilizes multiple representations, requiring students to work with physical phenomena, chemical equations, digital simulations, and modifiable code-based representations. Much CT focus on abstraction naturally emphasizes (1) extraction of a set of features from an object or process, and (2) finding commonality between objects and processes. But Rosen encourages us to think about abstraction as also including the production of new concepts or actions. Integrating CT into science offers the possibility of enhancing this aspect of abstraction. Changing the representational affordances available to the students allows them to take their CT thinking beyond learning-to-abstract towards learning-through-abstraction. This perspective moves computation from an internally focused exercise into the expression of valued ideas in a computational medium.

Download paper here YouTube video of the presentation

A book chapter arguing for moving beyond individual empowerment to structural negotiations in participatory design.

Integrating computational thinking (CT) and science education is complex, and assessing the resulting learning gains even more so. Arguments that assessment should match the learning lead to a performance-oriented approach to assessment, using tasks that mirror the integrated instruction. This approach reaps benefits but also poses challenges. Integrated CT is a new approach to learning. Movement is being made toward understanding what it means to operate successfully in this context, but consensus is neither general nor time tested. Movement is also being made toward developing methods for assessing CT. Despite the benefits of matching assessment with pedagogy, there may be intrinsic losses. One problem is that interactions between the two domains may invalidate the results, either because the gains in one may be easier to measure at certain times than the gains in the other, or because interactions between the two domains may cause measurement interference. Our examination draws upon both theoretical basis and also existing practices, particularly from our own work integrating CT and secondary science. We present a mixed-methods analysis of student assessment results and consider potential issues with moving too quickly toward relying on a rubric-based approach to evaluating this student learning. Centrally, we emphasize the importance of assessment approaches that reflect one of the most important affordances of computational environments, that is, the expression of multiple ways of knowing and doing.

Download paper here

We present a set of technologies designed in our research group where the focus has been on highlighting the nuanced but critical agency of people to shape interaction with their world using and through computers. Our design stance emerged by critically seeing technology’s existing power and authority. Taken separately, design traits that promote agency are visible but not necessarily salient. This demo presents different technologies that approach this design direction from different angles and in different contexts. Through this demo, we hope to widen the discussion on the role of design to bring about a kind of power and authority that reflects us not as compliant consumers but more in terms of our better natures.

Download paper here

This paper presents our initial experiences introducing and refining a voice-annotated web application to a group of people who have limited experience with technology. We conducted a two-week training program for a group of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal to help them sell their handicrafts on an online marketplace. We incorporate voices in two senses: by providing naturalistic, extended voice annotation with colloquial phrasing and intonation and by using the survivors’ words and images in the interface. The colloquial phrases helped in use and we saw the survivors adopting the phrases to explain the system. We contemplate design approaches to make web applications accessible to people with limited digital fluency.

Download paper here

Rapid technological advances have made computational skills more important to fully participate in society and our global economy, and as a result, computational thinking has earned attention in K–12 education as a means to preparing the future workforce. With an already congested curriculum, one approach is to integrate computational thinking into core classes that all students already take. This chapter reports on the integration of computational thinking in middle school chemistry classes. We focus on one teacher’s pedagogical strategies employed in each of the two integrated domains—in this case, computational thinking and science. We describe variations in the teacher’s approach across the two domains, noting that certain approaches to pedagogy and classroom discourse align with computational thinking. Such strategies were observed less frequently when the instruction focused on the less familiar domain of computational thinking. Second, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that programming and computational thinking are entirely new fields for most teachers and teachers need considerable opportunity to learn this new domain to optimize its integration.

Please send me an email if you want a copy of this paper.

In recent years, Computational Thinking (CT) has gained status as an essential skill. With little room in K –12 curricula for new content, an alternative method for providing students opportunities to develop these skills is to incorporate CT into classes that all students take. However, there is not enough research in this context to conclude that integrating CT with other domains truly does deepen learning in both areas. This paper highlights evidence that students can learn CT and science in tandem, particularly when pedagogy weaves the two domains into classroom tasks in complementary ways. We describe how the scientific practice of argumentation can act as a synergistic tool, engaging students with both science and CT within the same activity. Quantitative results of a pre/post performance assessment and qualitative analyses of student artifacts demonstrate that argumentation holds potential for simultaneously engaging students with science and CT.

Download paper here

This note presents an analysis of videos containing narrative stories of eight women in Nepal who had experienced domestic violence. The analysis highlights multifaceted issues and dependencies that coerced the survivors to stay in the abusive environment. Further, we present cases where the legal system failed to support the survivor because it overlooked the survivor’s unique and complex situation. We contrast those cases with agency-supporting cases where the survivors had more control and could decide when and how they wanted to engage resources. We argue that designed systems, whether they be technologies or public policies, need to support the survivor’s agency rather than seeing them as victims needing to be saved.

Download paper here

We report on an initial ethnographic exploration of the situation of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal. In the course of studying trafficking survivors in a protected-living situation created by a non-governmental organization in Nepal, we adapted photo-elicitation to hear the voices of the survivors by making the technique more communal. Bringing sociality to the forefront of the method reduced the pressure on survivors to assert voices as individuals, allowing them to speak. We make three contributions to research. First, we propose a communal form of photo-elicitation as a method to elicit values in sensitive settings. Second, we present the complex circumstances of the survivors as they undergo rehabilitation and move towards life with a “new normal”. Third, our work adds to HCI and CSCW literature on understanding specific concerns of trafficking survivors and aims to inform designs that can support reintegration of survivors in society. The values that the survivors hold and their notion of future opportunities suggest possession of limited but important socialcapital in some domains that could be leveraged to aid reintegration.

Download paper here

This note uncovers a design tension in participatory design practicein the context of two organizations in Nepal working on reducing sex-trafficking and helping survivors. The dilemma consists of contradictions between the public face that the organizations present to the world and the more complex underlying picture painted by survivors. In initial work, we created and deployed a value-elicitation game for survivors that gave us better access to their voices. However, the implications for ongoing participatory work remain to beunpacked. The veneer may constitute a necessary part of the staffs’ successful interactions with external funders. The survivors rely on the resources that the organization gathers, yet the veneer may also obscure some aspects of the survivors’ needs. The question raised is “how should our PD practice position itself with respect to the ideal of comprehensive democratic participation when potential harm may ensue to vulnerable people?”

Download paper here

Examining the affordances of an immersive learning environment.

There is a growing need to use computers to formulate problems andtheir solutions across domains. It has thus become imperative that students across the globe be able to work with computing to express themselves. However, teaching computer science in a traditional way may not be possible in all settings. We studied a method to integrate computational thinking, the ability to express problems and their solutions to a computing device, into an existing science classroom with the goal of deepening learning in both science and computational thinking in a low-resource setting in Nepal. In this note, we present findings from the study. The proposed curricular method acknowledges local differences and presents a way to adapt to those differences through adaptable multiple layers of activities and representational variability. We hope that interested educators and development practitioners would try our method in classrooms.

Download paper here

A good understanding of the practices followed by software development projects can positively impact their success - particularly for attracting talent and on-boarding new members. In this paper, we perform a cluster analysis to classify software projects that follow continuous integration in terms of their activity, popularity, size, testing, and stability. Based on this analysis, we identify and discuss four different groups of repositories that have distinct characteristics that separates them from the other groups. With this new understanding, we encourage open source projects to acknowledge and advertise their preferences according to these defining characteristics, so that they can recruit developers who share similar values.

Download paper here

Computational thinking (CT) has received considerable attention over the past decade among educators and researchers. However, given the multiple goals of the educational system, and already demanding school curriculum, there is limited scope for adding computational thinking as a separate subject in schools. This project integrates CT and Chemistry in activities for middle school. By “activity”, we mean a NetLogo-based Chemistry environment which uses both the simulation and the structure of the underlying code model as resources for teaching, along with chemistry and computational thinking curriculum materials, and teacher professional development. This paper discusses tensions between different concerns in the design process. We hope that our finding will illuminate some issues in designing an integrated activity and inform future research.

Download paper here