Innovating Novel Online Social Spaces with Diverse Middle School Girls: Ideation and Collaboration in a Synchronous Virtual Design Workshop

Title of the Paper

Innovating Novel Online Social Spaces with Diverse Middle School Girls: Ideation and Collaboration in a Synchronous Virtual Design Workshop

Paper Information

• Field of Study: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Participatory Design, and Adolescent Education
• Keywords: Participatory Design, Social Media, Synchronous Communication, Middle School Girls, Confidence, Collaboration, Group Facilitation

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Problems or Challenges: Middle school is a critical period for adolescents' social and identity development. Specifically, girls' confidence in science and engineering fields often begins to decline during this stage, affecting their future ability to engage in innovation. Meanwhile, with the widespread use of digital technology, adolescents are increasingly interacting with social media, yet they have limited participatory opportunities in designing and developing these platforms.

• Significance: Participatory design can empower adolescents, enabling them to become creators of digital technology. However, addressing the unique needs of middle school girls (especially those from diverse backgrounds) and providing educational resources and tools for remote participatory design remains an unresolved issue.

• Research Motivation and Related Work: This study aims to explore the socio-technical needs of middle school girls through participatory design workshops and empower them to design positive social media spaces. Core questions include:

  • How can tools and methods be developed to support girls in designing positive online social spaces?
  • How can collaboration and creative expression be facilitated in virtual environments?

Solution

• Proposed Method or Solution: The research team designed a four-day virtual participatory design workshop targeting diverse middle school girls aged 11 to 14, exploring innovative designs for positive social media experiences.

• Innovative Aspects of the Solution:

  • Leveraging social media as a foundation for computational exploration, combining highly relevant domains with technical skills.
  • Group collaboration: Each group consisted of one facilitator and 3-4 students, engaging in low-tech complexity design tasks using participatory design tools such as Google Slides and Seesaw.
  • Comprehensive use of a digital ecosystem, providing multiple interaction channels ranging from private reflection to shared design.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Persona Design: Creating virtual personas to simulate target users and establish consensus on design challenges.
  2. Brainstorming and Sketch Design: Groups collaboratively generated ideas, encouraging open and divergent thinking.
  3. Final Project Creation and Presentation: Students consolidated their earlier creations to design new online social spaces promoting positive interactions and presented their designs to the entire group.
  4. Support through Multiple Tools: Platforms like Zoom, Google Slides, and Seesaw were used to monitor design progress and enhance participation comfort.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  • Generated multiple creative designs for positive online social spaces, including algorithm-based negative content filtering, localized social communities, and interest-matching chat platforms.
  • The designs reflected middle school girls' attention to social issues such as climate change and environmental protection, distinguishing them from traditional social media functionalities.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Unlike traditional social media, which often emphasizes selfies and broad sharing behaviors, the workshop outcomes focused more on emotional support, personal expression, and possibilities for face-to-face interaction.
  • The workshop provided effective support tailored to the age and participatory characteristics of middle school girls through different collaborative strategies employed by facilitators.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Participants provided positive feedback on group collaboration and the final design phase, describing the virtual design environment as safe and supportive of free expression.
  • Over the course of the workshop, participants transitioned from passive engagement to active participation, demonstrating personal growth trajectories.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The sample size was small (17 participants), and the data primarily came from minority girls in the U.S., limiting the generalizability of the results to other groups.
  • Future Directions: Expanding the study's scale to explore how to sustain younger students' interest in participation and develop collaborative support systems addressing technical concerns. Similar workshops could also be conducted in more geographic regions to validate the universality of the findings.

This study demonstrates the potential of virtual participatory design workshops in fostering middle school girls as creators of digital technology and proposes a series of important design frameworks beneficial to technology and education research.