Cultivating Community and Creating Safe Spaces: Exploring A Design Toolkit for the Learned Values of Students of Color

Recently, there has been growing interest in designing future technologies for and with Students of Color (SoC) within HCI scholarship. This study focuses on centering SoC's desire for flourishing as a means of empowerment and prioritizing their positive and meaningful experiences within predominantly white institutions (PWIs) in the United States. Motivated by this, we conducted a two-phase case study with SoC. In the first phase, qualitative semi-structured interviews with 17 SoC were conducted. Findings revealed the development of learned values such as pride, resistance, hope, and aspirations, which facilitated students' strong personal growth and cultural development. In the second phase, we utilized these findings to create a SoC learned values toolkit. This toolkit was used to facilitate five co-design studies with 13 SoC, to imagine future technologies that foster and promote their flourishing. The co-design research resulted in 13 social technology design proposals. Empirical analysis of the co-design sessions demonstrated that participants' desires involved finding safe spaces, accessing resources, connecting with racially similar communities, and building relationships with role models. We further identified an emergent tension between the envisioned technologies for flourishing and the ethical implications of trust, vulnerability, and the spread of misinformation. Resisting design universalism, this paper celebrates the specificity of a design process for our audience of SoC PWI students. We conclude by providing recommendations for future pluriversal designs that prioritize SoC's desire for flourishing.