Participatory Design by Proxy?
Practices for Ensuring Inclusion of Marginalized Communities
Bethany R. Edmunds, Sara Bavan, Shuying Du, Tianyu Fang, Jieling Gong, Qingman Li,
Panxin Liu, Xiaolin Liu, Anran Lyu, Jiayi Qian, Yuzheng Shi, Jiahui Song,
Dana Zhan, Timothy Edmunds, Yvonne Coady
b.edmunds@northeastern.edu
Northeastern University, Vancouver

Abstract
This paper outlines some of the challenges and opportunities we
have encountered when working with marginalized communities
in a graduate-level software engineering course. We have found
that typical participatory design workshops were not suitable for
the communities we are working with, and instead propose a proxy
approach—relying upon interactions with expert practitioners instead of directly interacting with community members.
Here we share our motivation and experiences from our current
course offering, where students are designing applications for a
community of neurodiverse users.
ACM Reference Format:
Bethany R. Edmunds, Sara Bavan, Shuying Du, Tianyu Fang, Jieling Gong,
Qingman Li,, Panxin Liu, Xiaolin Liu, Anran Lyu, Jiayi Qian, Yuzheng Shi,
Jiahui Song,, Dana Zhan, Timothy Edmunds, Yvonne Coady. 2025. Participatory Design by Proxy? Practices for Ensuring Inclusion of Marginalized
Communities. IAssessment. In Proceedings of the 27th Western Canadian
Conference on Computing Education (WCCCE). April 28–29, 2025,
Calgary, Canada. 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.60770/hvqc-wa77

1 Motivation
Academic classrooms are not always well suited to the inclusion
of marginalized community members. For example, in the course
experience we currently have underway, we have graduate students
in software engineering who are highly talented and motivated
to build technology that addresses issues of equity [7], but lack
experience working with communities of neurodiverse users. These
users face barriers in accessing everyday digital services, including
basic information from web-based sources. This further perpetuates
what is known as "digital design marginalization" [6], where an
interface design actually excludes groups of users and contributes
to marginalization in other areas of their lives. Our aim is to explore
how we can address some of the barriers to inclusion and bridge the
gap between our students and these marginalized communities by
trying an approach we have called participatory design by proxy.

2 Design Methodology
Throughout several offerings of our graduate level software engineering courses in the requirements gathering processes and
as students were making design decisions, they would often fall
back into what they had learned in their previous coursework
when itis

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© 2025 Copyright held by the authors.
https://doi.org/10.60770/hvqc-wa77

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Commons Attribution International 4.0
License.

came to best practices and design conventions. So, even though
the features they were adding were to accommodate the specific
needs of marginalized populations, the foundational assumptions
remained. To address this gap, course content was added on developing for accessibility, unconscious bias, and specific information
on particular neurodiverse populations. In addition the students
were asked to take their own unconscious bias test [5] and abide
by the Khoury College Oath for Computing Professionals [2].
In addition, the teaching team brought in advisors that had an
advocacy roles for the marginalized population to work with the
students every few weeks to give feedback on the progress that
the students were making and answer any questions that they
had. While best practices are to consult with the users directly,
the professors felt that asking so much time of the community
members for the development of the students would further tax
and already overtaxed population. In addition, while our students
have the best intentions and agreed to abide by our code of ethics,
bringing community members in front of students who are just
starting their journey may be uncomfortable and possibly even
harmful.

3 Proxy Selection
An integral part of this design process was the choosing of the proxy.
In our first iteration of this course, we used a team of software entrepreneurs who themselves were from a marginalized population.
However, the focus was on the needs of the proxies who made all of
the design decisions and the students learned little about the target
user population. So, for this iteration, the chosen proxy who was
not actually a member of the community, but had been an advocate
and educator for the community for over twenty years. This broad
experience allowed for her to speak to many different types of users
and limit the overfitting of the solution to an individual. In addition,
she had limited technical expertise, so instead of making design
decisions, she informed the students of how different individuals
would interact with and feel about the designs that the students
chose. This approach led to the students thinking more about the
community members’ experiences.

4 Key Features of Current Projects
The students currently have 4 projects underway: Résonance, Polish Bot, ReadEase and LumiRead. Each project has been developed
using an agile methodology and participatory design by proxy. Key
features that have been identified in each are highlighted below.
Résonance is an AI-powered assistant that helps users with communication challenges express emotions clearly and appropriately

Edmunds et al.

WCCCCE ’25’, April 28–29, 2025, Calgary, AB, Canada

across different social contexts. By guiding users through emotion
selection and generating personalized, context-aware messages, it
reduces communication anxiety and enhances emotional fluency1 .
Polish Bot addresses key challenges in academic communication and learning by assisting users in crafting context-sensitive
emails and text messages, and enhancing video-based education
with interactive Q&A features to improve retention. It integrates
seamlessly with academic tools to support writing clarity, semantic analysis, and social cue awareness, reducing communication
anxiety and learning inefficiencies2 .
ReadEase transforms the digital reading experience through
three powerful, complementary features: text simplification, summarization, and synchronized text-to-speech. Together, these capabilities create an environment where neurodiverse users can
engage with digital content on their own terms, shifting the burden
of adaptation from the individual to the technology3 .
LumiRead is a browser extension that makes online reading
easier and more accessible. It combines ReadMode, Text-to-Speech,
Translation and AI-powered reading level adjustment to reduce
distractions and adapt content to different reading needs. The extension aims to create a universally supportive reading experience
across the web regardless of language, ability or learning style4 .
With the addition of these key features, the students go beyond
current state of the art software offerings by encompassing the
complex nature of the user population’s need and allowing them
to more easily accomplish their desired tasks.

5

Impact of Proxy Intervention

Here we provide several concrete examples of how our participatory
design by proxy was able to provide valuable feedback for some of
the project work in the class.
The group that created ReadEase did so to make the language
on the websites being browsed more accessible. As they worked
through the technical aspects of the projects, the proxies reminded
the students to revisit the user’s original task. Specifically, while
the development task was to find a way to rephrase and display
the text on the website, the user’s task was to gather information
from the website. Realizing this allowed them to add additional
features, like ad removal, text centering, and other user interface
choices that addressed compounding issues that were affecting the
users. These changes made the software more successful. Since
the students were unfamiliar with the target audience, this process
of re-centreing the users’ needs was emphasized multiple times.
Each time, the students were able to see where their assumptions
were sneaking in and the users’ goals were getting lost among the
technical specifications.
The students working on Polish Bot decided that they wanted
to help individuals with social anxiety and neurodivergent communication send text messages and email with their professors. Again,
they researched the packages and technical aspects, but were having difficulties understanding when the community members would
feel the need to use the software. Through conversations with the
proxies, they were able to better understand the use cases as well
1 https://github.com/songjiahui0210/resonance
2 https://github.com/YuzhengShi/electron 𝑝𝑝
𝑎
3 https://github.com/doudou2077/ReadEase

4 https://lumiread.netlify.app

as learned the risks that came with a poor user interface like discouraging the community members and taking away their agency.
It was possible that through poor design, their tool could make
the users question or doubt themselves instead of having them be
heard – the exact opposite of the students’ intent.

6

Potential Impact on Community, Conclusions
and Future Work

While the practice of incorporating real-world projects into courses
has been well documented in terms of benefits to students [1, 3],
many schools are working towards having these projects benefit
community-based non-profit organizations to make a bigger impact [4]. Unfortunately, due to the many barriers of meaningful
inclusion, many students require additional resources to fully grasp
the diverse needs of marginalized communities. In an ideal world,
this education would be able to be introduced through integration
directly with community members—but our priority has to be to
limit the knowledge extraction and exploitation of these groups. For
this reason, we proposed and piloted a program using community
proxies as advisors to our students to provide insight for student
learning and better software development for these under-served
populations. The results from this pilot have shown there is tremendous potential for student growth with repeated interactions with
the proposed proxy client. In the future we hope that with the proxies’ guidance, the students will be able to safely receive validation
on the software projects from community members directly. We
also hope this starts a conversation in the CS Education community
on this and other approaches.

References
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