AImpower x UC Santa Cruz Designathon: Innovating for Community-Led AI Initiatives

This past weekend, February 22-23, AImpower.org collaborated with University of California, Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension to host an exciting design challenge focused on creating inclusive technologies for and with people who stutter. Students were invited to design a data collection and governance platform to support people who stutter to comfortably contribute their speech for building more inclusive AI speech technologies.

Our design challenge brought together over 20 talented students across disciplinary backgrounds, from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), UX Design, to Natural Language Processing (NLP), to better understand stuttering experiences and explore innovative design solutions that rooted in the needs and values of the stuttering community.

Over the course of two days, five student teams worked intensively to understand the challenges faced by people who stutter and develop thoughtful design solutions. While some teams took advantage of existing scientific knowledge and literature on stuttering by reviewing academic papers, two teams took an extra step by conducting community interviews—an impressive feat given the short timeframe of the challenge. These students engaged directly with people who stutter, gathering valuable insights that shaped their design decisions.

Team Projects and Key Insights

The student teams approached this challenge with dedication, creativity, and empathy.The diverse range of solutions highlighted the students’ ability to think critically and design with both technical and community-centered perspectives. Below are the design outcomes from the five teams:

• “Speech for Good”: A gamified platform where users feed a cute virtual creature by recording sentences, making speech data collection interactive and enjoyable. The platform emphasizes transparency, explicit consent, community-building, and user control, allowing participants to retract their data anytime by providing an email before they exit.
• “The Speaking Garden”: A stutter-affirming, community-driven platform that empowers people with stutters to contribute speech data on their terms, emphasizing consent, transparency, and community.
• “Speak Easy”: An all-in-one game app designed to support individuals who stutter by providing engaging and interactive activities to practice speaking while collecting valuable data to enhance speech recognition.
• “Unmute”: A speech practice app designed to help people who stutter improve their confidence and fluency. Users can record their speech, receive guidance on slowing down and incorporating pauses, and contribute their recordings to a growing dataset that enhances speech recognition.
• “SlugSpeech”: A gamified speech data collection app that incentivizes users to contribute diverse speech samples through interactive missions. Users earn points by completing speech tasks in various environments.

Recognizing Excellence

On Monday, each team gave a 5-min pitch for their design. The judging panel, including AImpower Research Fellow Dr. Jingjin Li and UC Santa Cruz faculty Professor Norman Su, and Professor Yassi Moghaddam, awarded two teams the first-place prize: Team “The Speaking Garden” and Team “Speech for Good” for their overall quality of the user research, design, feasibility and response to the challenge. Additionally, Team “Speak Easy” received an honorable mention for their outstanding visual design of a speech-related game.

Beyond the Design Challenge: Raising Public Awareness of Stuttering

As the first design challenge we co-hosted with UC Santa Cruz, it served as a meaningful educational opportunity. Many students expressed that this was their first encounter with stuttering and designing for this community. The challenge provided them with hands-on experience in inclusive design, fostering awareness and empathy beyond technical implementation.

AImpower is incredibly proud to have sponsored this design challenge and looks forward to continuing our mission of co-creating empowering technologies with and for marginalized communities. We also extend our gratitude to UC Santa Cruz for their collaboration and support in this design challenge.

Read more about the design challenge and the teams here.