Towards culturally sustaining design: Centering community’s voices for learning through Participatory Design

Embedding cultural ways of knowing and being of non-dominant communities into learning tools and environments often falls short of authentically representing the people they are meant to serve. Designers have used principles and methods of Participatory Design (PD) to work alongside minoritized communities due to its roots in democratic participation. However, following PD methods may fall short when infusing the community’s culture and values in the design in a way that is responsive to the community’s preferences, intentions and aspirations. In the field of education, researchers and practitioners have designed teaching and learning tools and environments by leveraging the cultural wealth and ways of knowing of minoritized learners through an asset-based perspective, as exemplified by Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). In this paper we present a case study for the development of a mobile application to extend physical playful learning spaces, designed with local low-income Latine families to foster fun family learning. We highlight how our design practices helped us center youth voices and community ways of knowing and being, particularly in the stages of ideation, concept, testing, and prototyping. Our case study reflects how we foregrounded cultural values and practices into our educational mobile application. Through these practices, we present concrete examples and initial building blocks for future work towards building a Culturally Sustaining Design Framework.