This work presents a Feminist approach to Participatory Design focusing on provoking and subverting hegemonic narratives. Through Design Anthropology projects in the field of Active Aging, I aim at defining design tactics for making the Common visible. The system design literature on Active Aging presents aging as a problem that needs to be fixed and it attributes to older adults aging negative stereotypes, promoting in this way ageism. This narrative is influenced by, as it informs, the EU policies that fund projects on the design of assistive technologies through a rhetoric of compassion towards those considered older people. At date, critical interdisciplinary approaches consider the concept of aging in modern societies as a bio-product of capitalism, since it is related to the end of a person’s work life and therefore the end of her/his productive capacity. My thesis is positioned at the intersection between critical approaches and community-based Participatory Design, considering design as one of the practices for raising awareness and taking care of the common. The Common is the ensemble of material and immaterial resources that allow people to be tied together and it can be looked at in a positive and liberating way, in contrast with hegemonic and normative constraints, as the implications of active aging narrative. In my view Participatory Design is one of the approaches to subvert and rebalance power-relations, and for this reason I adopted it in my work. Therefore, the leading research question is: How can we learn to recognize the Common through a Participatory Design process? To answer this research question, Participatory Design is informed by Design Anthropology and Feminism. The former restitues the importance of anthropological reflexivity in the encounter with the Otherness and the in-depth empirical work of field-work. The latter provides an intersectional lens that offers the decisive lever to shift the focus from the homogeneous fictional image of the ``older person’’, to the rich heterogeneity of human beings, that includes not just the age identity, but multiple identity layers (gender, ethnicity, economy, education...). This shift of focus has been done mainly through the deconstruction of negative aging stereotypes (ageism), predominant in the institutional narratives of Active Aging, whether they are in the policies, in system design literature or in people’s everyday life. In this way the shift of focus highlights the passage from the Active Aging perspective to the Common one, and from the user to the participants towards a collective dimension in which aging becomes a secondary element in favour of the Common, as relational quality and ability to cooperate and self-organize. For this reason the case studies presented are situated in community-based organizations of - in institutional terms - older adults. The case studies are settled in three different contexts and with different design ideas, as they emerge from ethnographic fieldwork: working on public mobility in a grassroot movement of seniors and pensioners in a mountain community; sharing knowledge and competencies in an annual laboratory on digital technologies promoted by a social cooperative and organized by the university; improving communication and making compost in top-down senior social gardens, organized by senior social clubs and promoted by the local municipality. The case studies presented are situated in precarious contexts, that is, in which the available resources are scarce, there is little or not institutional safety net and the only way for the design researcher (myself) to set a project is through building informal and trustful relationships with the participants, nurturing attachments and managing stereotypes that the participants may have about her. The main contribution of my work is having elaborated guidelines that include relational movements and design tactics to reframe hegemonic design contexts and empowering people that are involved in, to re-imagining themselves from users to participants and to be entitled and responsible to design their own technologies in their own means, to strengthen the Common that ties them together. The design processes that me and the communities realized are constituted by the relational movements of exploration, provocation, conflict, reflexivity and appropriation. In contemporary times, where the Common is often dispossessed and converted to a product, and we are called to fight capitalistic forces to maintain the capacity of cooperate, the Common is often not evident in our everyday life. From my empirical work I elaborated three design tactics that can inform design projects that aim at making the Common visible, and these are: decolonizing hegemonic narratives, nurturing attachments with the people we designers work with, and creating contextual ethics to help us making decisions when encountering conflicts between ours and participants’ agendas.

The mainstream ecosystem has proven unsustainable in terms of livelihood, environmental stewardship, cultural heritage, and social equality. To alleviate these problems, a range of top-down strategies has been deployed, but they are often ineffective in addressing the specific needs and aspirations of diverse contexts. On the other hand, bottom-up initiatives started by communities also face organisational and resource limitations that prevent them from becoming resilient. Within this context, service design for social innovation has become a well-established human-centred, strategic and systemic approach to tackling such challenges. However, designers have put much emphasis on the use of fixed toolkits that result in one-size-fits-all outputs. Instead, this thesis argues for a more situated and embedded approach to service design. With this in mind, the aim of the research was to explore new roles, purposes and methods the service designer can adopt to activate communities to transition towards a more sustainable future. For this purpose, participatory case studies were undertaken with two textile artisan communities (in Nottingham, UK, and Cape Town, South Africa), chosen as relevant cases of design, production and consumption. As a result of both cases, the designer activated the artisans, previously working in an isolated and precarious condition, to become a community and outline a situated service proposition that embeds a shared vision for a sustainable future. Building on emerging anthropological approaches to service design, the thesis contributes an original methodological framework, which equips the service designer with cultural sensibility when entering communities, aiding in making sense of sustainable futures, facilitating the co-design of situated services and activating local legacies. In this, the investigation evidenced the diverse roles - cultural insider, storyteller, sensemaker, facilitator, and activist - the service designer can play throughout a social innovation process. Furthermore, the thesis emphasised that the mastery of the designer lies in the skill of tailoring his/her approach to specific contexts in order to craft situated services that are meaningful to the communities using them.

As mobile phones become increasingly ubiquitous in today’s world, academic and public audiences alike are curious about the interaction between mobile technologies and social norms. To investigate this phenomenon, I examined how individuals use technology to actively manage their communication behaviors. Through a three-month research project on usage patterns of Burner, a mobile application, this thesis explores the relationships among technology, culture, and privacy. Burner is a service that equips individuals with the means to create, maintain, and/or dissolve social ties by providing temporary, disposable numbers to customers. The application offers a way to communicate without relying on a user’s personal phone number. In other words, Burner acts as a “privacy layer” for mobile phones. It also provides a valuable platform to examine how customers use the application as a strategy for communication management. This thesis represents a marriage of practice and theory: (1) As an applied enterprise, the project was constructed as a customer needs assessment intending to examine how the service was situated in the lives of its users. The findings have successfully been applied to my client’s company strategy and have led to a more informed customer approach. (2) As an academic endeavor, this research contributes to existing scholarship in anthropology, computer-mediated communication, privacy, and design. The results provide rich fodder for discussions about the impact of mobile communication and services.

Digital language archives are used for the preservation of documented language data, such as video and voice recordings, transcriptions, survey data, and ethnographic fieldnotes. This data is most often used for research and linguists and anthropologists are generally heavily involved in the creation of language archives. Ideally, Indigenous communities that are represented in the archives are also able to access their data, but this is not always the case, especially if poor internet access and lack of technological know-how prevent archive use. In addition, western epistemologies are embedded in archival logics, exacerbating the issues surrounding Indigenous access and pointing to the need for a decolonizing archival design that centers the needs of its users. Using ethnographic research methods and a decolonizing framework, I conducted a usability study on the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) to uncover the cultural-based meanings that inform AILLA use. Using linguistics and anthropology listservs, I recruited research participants for a Qualtrics survey and conducted semi-structured interviews that explore the user perspective on AILLA. I analyzed AILLA's Google Analytics data and used qualitative and quantitative research methods to build upon the previous literature in user-centered design approaches to language archives. As one of the largest online language archives in the world, AILLA serves an important role in the language documentation and cultural revitalization movement. Continued research in the field of user-centered design and non-Western epistemologies is necessary to ensure the accessibility of language archives and for AILLA to fulfill its mission of support for the survival of the Indigenous languages of Latin America.

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This was a mixed-method user-centered study regarding the University of North Texas's student-owned learner record and credentialing system. Through methods of quantitative and qualitative inquiry, student perceptions were unearthed and recommendations to improve the system were provided.

This thesis describes a research study to understand the current state of human trafficking data collection practices and reporting in the province of Alberta, Canada, and gather end-user design considerations for cyberinfrastructure that will enable data sharing between multiple and diverse stakeholders. The research also examines the barriers to change and the needs of stakeholders to improve the collective understanding of human trafficking in the province. Virtual semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen organizations including law enforcement and community serving non-profit agencies. While the research resulted in design considerations for a cyberinfrastructure prototype, findings revealed the complexity of the human trafficking ecosystem in Alberta and suggestions for how the community of stakeholders can shift towards a sustained collaborative data sharing culture. This study responds to the need to collect actionable data from multiple sources to reflect the prevalence and context of human trafficking more accurately.

Missile Combat Crew members are officers in the United States Air Force responsible for operating nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. They undergo on-the-job training as part of the curriculum necessary to progress in their careers and achieve higher levels of job responsibility. The curriculum they use is created and maintained by 20th Air Force Test and Training Section. This product is known as the Missile Combat Crew Commander Upgrade program, and it has received criticisms from stakeholders who use it for being out of date and failing to capture the necessary topics for ensuring adequate on the job training is being conducted. This project seeks to examine these critiques, break down the curriculum produced by 20th AF into stages (creation, implementation, and feedback) for evaluation, uses principles of user-oriented design drawing on design anthropology to suggest alternative methods for curriculum creation, and utilizes the results of a diagnostic survey to provide data-driven recommendations to 20th AF for future rewrites of their product based on feedback from the crew members who use their product in the field.

Several studies have indicated that American Indian students in the United States higher education system confront unique challenges that derive from a legacy of colonialism and assimilationist policies (Huff 1997). Several scholars, American Indian and non-Native alike, have explored the effects of this history upon students in higher education (Brayboy 2004; Guillory and Wolverton 2008; Waterman and Lindley 2013). Very few, however, have explored the role of the educators of American Indian students, and most of the literature focuses on K-12 educational settings (McCarty and Lee 2014; Yong and Hoffman 2014). This thesis examines exploratory user research conducted to generate a foundational understanding of educators of American Indian students in higher education. Utilizing methods from design anthropology and user experience, semi-structured interviews and think-aloud sessions were conducted, almost exclusively virtually, for 17 participants. This research was conducted for a client, Fire & Associates, as part of the applied thesis process. Findings revealed a complex web of needs for educators of American Indian students in higher education related to teaching diverse students, the use of media and technology in the classroom, and the process of networking among other educators. The research culminated in content and design implications for the Fire & Associates website as well as suggestions for further research based on best practices in the field of user experience.

This thesis describes a pilot study for a new cultural anthropology initiative at Team One, a US-based premium and luxury brand advertising agency. In this study, I explore the role and meaning of technology among a population of affluent individuals in Southern California through diaries and ethnographic interviews conducted in their homes. Using schema theory and design anthropology to inform my theoretical approach, I discuss socioeconomic and cultural factors that shape these participants' notions of affluence and influence their presentation of self through an examination of their technology and proudest possessions. I put forward a theory of conspicuous achievement as a way to describe how the affluent use technology to espouse a merit-based model of affluence. Through this model of affluence, participants strive to align themselves to the virtuous middle-class while ascribing moral value to their consumption practices. Lastly, I provide a typology of meaningful technology artifacts in the affluent home that describes the roles of their most used tech devices and how each type supports conspicuous achievement.