The big issues

Our project asks: Can VR and XR technology, when deployed as a digital design method, enhance current Community Technology practices to further the inclusive and innovative design of safe online digital spaces for women from underserved communities?

One current research study at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures suggests that Community Technology, as a diverse and mutable sociodigital practice, offers the potential for communities to reimagine the futures that are possible for themselves.

The project builds on work carried out by Women Rise Up, a CIC based in Blackburn Lancashire, to create an online digital platform for leadership development.

The CIC reports, in evidence collated so far from working with women in their community, that opportunities for leadership development are often culturally inappropriate, tend to undervalue lived experiences, and are reductive about the skills developed though roles held in their community and the implicit knowledge that comes from these roles.

The CIC believes that an inclusive digital online leadership platform could offer the potential to develop skills, contacts, and appropriate training in a safe and mutually constituted culturally appropriate online space.

They are clear about the value and purpose that a platform like this could offer but want to deploy speculative design and digital methods that engage with tech, like VR or XR, to explore the possibilities it presents to support a radical design process.

In addition, the project investigates how these methods might generate alternatives to the often suboptimal futures presented by others for underserved communities more broadly, towards ones that are preferred and desired by these communities themselves. 

Our response 

Our project will curate and codesign three events:  

• First, a methods workshop in the neutral lab at BDFI, bringing together external specialists in digital inclusion (Diversily), researchers of VR using SOMA (CenSoF), and members of Women Rise Up CiC. This will explore methods to develop modes of imagination of bodies and identity, “level the design playing field”, use body mapping, SOMA VR work, and VR painting.  

• Secondly, an experiential workshop will follow, using the neutral lab facilities, that introduces women who are lead practitioners to the BDFI space to experience XR and VR technology. Deploying the methods that we have developed in the first workshop, we consider how might these tools deploy speculative design of digital spaces in the complex and intersectional context of leadership development and inclusion. 

• The third event will be co-designed as a result of the second experiential workshop. This workshop will work with women from different leadership settings to explore and interrogate the emerging speculative designs using VR and XR tech developed in event two.  

These workshops will inform the work with local web designers in Blackburn to develop a design proposal for further prototyping and piloting.