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

Abstract

Ending projects – in whatever form that takes – is a known area of difficulty for research that involves designing and implementing technologies with community partners. The ending process is particularly salient to underserved and marginalized communities and populations. This dissertation explores the project ecosystem and power dynamics in which researchers and participants exist when collaborating on technology design projects involving youth and their communities. From this exploration, I look to identify types of and strategies for ending, to build a framework for advancing design justice in the ending process.The first set of empirical studies in this dissertation address the power dynamics and roles within community-based technology design projects and multigenerational co-design teams. From this work we learn how we can encourage youth and their communities to take ownership of learning technologies through participatory design and involvement in the technology implementation process. Subsequent studies focus on the long-term impacts of such projects and how the community and researchers can begin to transition these technologies to community ownership, while understanding the resource constraints of both the researchers and communities, particularly the youth members. The final study — a cross case analysis of two long-term projects — extends this work on power dynamics and impacts, using the understanding of systems and infrastructure to frame our understanding of the equitable ending process and what different endings might look like. Together, these studies provide grounding for a framework to create a more just and equitable ending process, specifically creating guidelines for designing the end of the research cycle in an ethical and practical manner. This dissertation provides a number of empirical insights on the development and changes within relationships and power dynamics throughout the course of community-based educational technology design projects involving youth; the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities at the conclusion of the life cycle of the aforementioned projects; and the different ways ending a project occurs. The work also has theoretical implications, drawing on value sensitive design, research-practice partnerships, and other theories around community relationships to form an understanding of project ending as a space for design. Finally, this work contributes a theoretically-grounded methodological framework for designing projects involving long-term technology development with youth and their communities that plan for and incorporate the ending of the project, derived from the findings in the previous contributions. Through this work I 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 extractive and more mutually beneficial community research partnerships.