Designing Interactive and Immersive Socio-Technical Tools to Support Communication and Empowerment for Immigrant Communities
Adinawa D. Adjagbodjou · 2024
Communication plays a pivotal role in the navigation and settlement capabilities of immigrant communities. However, prior work documents the challenges to building these skills and conveys a necessity for expanding research into both the linguistic and socio-emotional challenges underlying them. In promoting the design of socio-technical tools to support their needs, the following studies center the lived experiences of immigrant language learning communities through an exploration of interactive, immersive, and social computing tools. Using participatory methods, this work engages in the deeply contextual practice of collaboratively imagining, conceptualizing, designing, and evaluating tools that center these communities' unique and nuanced experiences. We utilize mixed and experimental methods to build an empirical understanding of users, and design novel artifacts and frameworks for furthering design in this context in order to contribute approaches to augmenting the experiences of immigrant communities in achieving their goals.