Engaging recently incarcerated and gang affiliated Black and Latino/a young adults in designing social collocated applications for mixed reality smart glasses through community-based participatory design workshops

Involving Black and Latina/o communities early and often in emerging technology design can make innovation more democratic, address bias, and reduce harm against these marginalized groups. To the best of our knowledge, no work has examined how recently incarcerated and gang affiliated young adults conceptualize mixed reality (MR) use for social collocated scenarios based on their everyday interactions and meaning-making. To explore this topic, we used a design-based implementation research (DBIR) and community-based participatory design (CBPD) approach to elicit social-technical insights grounded in the personal and critical perspectives of these youth. We find participants frequently grounded design ideas as embodied design elements to surface intangible and invisible qualities such as emotions and reflections on lived experiences, namely criticizing institutional structures that have maintained exclusionary practices against them. We discuss how DBIR and CBPD can uncover larger societal issues impacting marginalized communities through emerging technology design, and we contribute design recommendations for social collocated interactions in MR.