Participatory design by proxy? Practices for ensuring inclusion of marginalized communities

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.