We believe that communities should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to design, develop, and evaluate technologies that impact their lives.
Guided by our training in technology, ethnography, and social sciences, as well as our own lived experiences with marginalization and intersectionality, we support marginalized communities to investigate and take charge of their technological experiences, one project at a time.
These projects showcase our work in partnership with different communities.
Stuttering and telecommunication technologies
1 to 3% of the world population stutter, but most of the challenges with stuttering are invisible. Stuttering is incurable and socially stigmatized: people who stutter suffer from verbal and physical bullying, social isolation, negative stereotypes, and reduced employment and relationship opportunities.
Technology has played an undeniable role in the marginalization of people who stutter. It is well documented that people who stutter find phone calls more challenging than in-person conversations, yet phone interviews have become a stable for many industries and employers.
While the widespread adoption of new communication technologies such as videoconferencing has been crucial in distributing employment opportunities across geographical boundaries, the impact of such technologies on PWS has not been studied or well understood. Hence, we parter with the stuttering community to investigate and re-envision videoconferencing tools to create space for inclusive and equitable telecommunication technologies for all.
Shaomei Wu – AImpower.org founder and researcher – has a stutter and leads interviews and group discussions with the community about our collective experiences with modern telecommunication technologies.
We also plan to conduct co-design workshops with the community to unleash our collective wisdom and empower people who stutter to take creative agency of our telecommunication experience.
Publications
- Shaomei Wu. 2023. “The World is Designed for Fluent People”: Benefits and Challenges of Videoconferencing Technologies for People Who Stutter. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23-28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580788
Check out the latest update from this project.
Literacy in the information dense world
This is a project AImpower.org researcher Shaomei Wu started with collaborators from University of Pittsburg and Meta, prior to the launch of AImpower.org. We will continue exploring this problem space with the partnership and support from communities facing literacy-related challenges.
We will share more about this project later.
AImpower.org 