Accounting for (Dis)advantages in Capability Sensitive Design for Marginalized Communities

Paper Title

Accounting for (Dis)advantages in Capability Sensitive Design for Marginalized Communities

Publication Info

• Topic area: Extending Capability Sensitive Design (CSD) to address systemic barriers and enablers in marginalized communities.
• Keywords: Capability Sensitive Design, corrosive disadvantages, fertile functionings, marginalized communities, participatory design, newcomer technology, systemic barriers, HCI, well-being, equity.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing Capability Sensitive Design (CSD) methods fail to account for the interdependencies between capabilities, limiting their ability to address cascading disadvantages (corrosive disadvantages) or amplify cascading benefits (fertile functionings).
• Significance: Addressing these interdependencies is critical for designing technologies that effectively support marginalized communities, where systemic barriers often compound and limit well-being.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in CSD and the Capability Approach (CA) has focused on translating abstract values into design requirements but has not systematically addressed how capabilities interact. Participatory Design (PD) and User-Centered Design (UCD) have been used to engage communities but lack structured frameworks for addressing systemic interdependencies.

Solution

• Proposed approach: CSD-Cascade, a structured workflow that extends CSD by incorporating corrosive disadvantages, fertile functionings, and conversion factors into the design process.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduces corrosive disadvantages and fertile functionings as explicit design considerations.
  2. Provides a structured, iterative workflow for identifying and addressing capability interdependencies.
  3. Combines participatory design and CSD to surface systemic leverage points and define actionable design requirements.
  4. Demonstrates the approach through a case study on a health navigation app for newcomers to Canada.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Conceptual investigation: Identify stakeholders, adapt Nussbaum’s capabilities to the community context, and define initial capability priorities.
  2. Empirical investigation: Use participatory methods (e.g., interviews, co-design workshops) to map capability interdependencies, identify corrosive disadvantages and fertile functionings, and surface conversion factors.
  3. Technical investigation: Translate findings into design requirements, develop and evaluate prototypes, and iteratively refine features through community feedback.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified two main corrosive disadvantages: lack of control over political and material environments and lack of social connections.
  • Found that social connections were the most fertile functioning, positively impacting multiple other capabilities.
  • Logged 436 plans created and 344 completed in the Newcomer App, with 89.8% marked as helpful in supporting capabilities.
  • 43 plans were identified as fertile, benefiting multiple capabilities simultaneously.
• Advantage over baselines: CSD-Cascade explicitly maps capability interdependencies, enabling more targeted interventions compared to traditional CSD, PD, or UCD approaches, which often treat capabilities as isolated.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted interviews with 50 newcomers and 16 organization representatives to identify capability priorities and interdependencies.
  • Organized co-design workshops with 29 participants to refine design requirements.
  • Deployed the Newcomer App in an 8-week field study with 39 active participants, analyzing app usage and post-study interviews.
  • Used thematic analysis and rank aggregation to evaluate capability gaps, fertile functionings, and conversion factors.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Gender imbalance in participant recruitment (32 female, 17 male).
  • Limited integration of certain capabilities (e.g., social connections) into app features beyond content curation.
  • Future work should explore benchmarking against existing newcomer tools using both general and community-derived metrics.

Summary

This paper introduces CSD-Cascade, an extension of Capability Sensitive Design (CSD) that incorporates corrosive disadvantages, fertile functionings, and conversion factors to address systemic interdependencies in marginalized communities. Through participatory design and iterative refinement, the authors developed and evaluated the Newcomer App, a multilingual resource navigation tool for newcomers to Canada. Results demonstrated the app’s ability to address capability priorities, enable fertile functionings, and support cascading well-being improvements. CSD-Cascade offers a structured, end-to-end methodology for designing technologies that enhance equity and well-being in marginalized contexts.