Over the last couple of months, I have given talks on how my team and I design for joy in our learning opportunities for youth and families. In April, I gave a talk for the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies at AERA 2024. Then in May, I adapted this talk for a keynote for the Colorado Library Association Maker Workshop. I share here an edited version of both talks, which is organized in three parts: What do I mean when I talk about joy? How do we design for joy? And how can joy be a sustaining force?
The text in this blog post captures my thinking at a moment in time and will continue to evolve. I welcome any feedback!
Two moms share their Scratch and Makey Makey project with their children and other families as part of a series of Family Creative Learning workshops.
I want to reflect on joy. Not joy as a static feeling like happiness or sadness, but joy as a dynamic and complex emotion that is interplay with struggle. In their book Joyful Militancy, Montgomery and bergman (2017) reflect on their own community organizing and talk with other activists and share the important role of joy in movement and change work. They write:
“A joyful process of transformation might involve happiness, but it tends to entail a whole range of feelings at once: it might feel overwhelming, painful, dramatic, and world-shaking, or subtle and uncanny. Joy rarely feels comfortable or easy, because it transforms and reorients people and relationships.”
The ideas I present today have emerged from ongoing conversations with Jaleesa Trapp, a PhD candidate at MIT, and Dr. Alexis Hope, who have both been doing community-centered and design-based work with various communities. We have been discussing and preparing a paper that asks, “What role has Joy played in our equity-centered, community-engaged design and research work?” Joy has been an aesthetic that has guided much of my and my team's design work with families and communities.
I use the word aesthetic to describe the set of design principles, perspectives, and values that guide our work. For this talk, I’m going to take a highly visual approach to presenting my research. In recent years, the pictorial format has grown in the designerly communities in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). The pictorial publication format has become a means to highlight the visual medium as a knowledge building artifact to create things that make you think and things that matter (Blevis, 2016). Our team’s approach to gathering these visuals has been rooted in the Reggio Emilia approach to documentation as a way to capture what we valued (things that matter) and to reflect on what we were experiencing (things that make you think) (Roque, 2020). We take a lot of care in the way we take these photos and reflect on our positions as documenters and the power that can be conveyed in a photo.
What do I mean when I talk about Joy?
I want to share how I came to know joy as an aesthetic.
My family and I immigrated from the Philippines when I was four years old and we lived in an area near downtown LA and eventually lived in and around what is now called Historic Filipinotown. From my perspective as a young child, immigrating felt like an adventure — visiting new places like a mall, running errands by bus, or even eating McDonalds. I went to an elementary school where nearly every kid was an immigrant like me and we'd trade stories of our different countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Gautamala, Mexico.
But it was a challenge for my family - my older siblings had to play surrogate parents as my parents worked multiple jobs, and we were also in a context of anti-immigration, during a time when Prop 187 was passed by people in California, which denied "illegal aliens" access to public services like education and healthcare. And it added anxieties and fears for my family because we didn’t have our papers. Fortunately, it was declared unconstitutional.
Much of what I’ve learned about joy and cultivating joy has come from the families and immigrant communities that I grew up in and the ways we gathered. I learned how joy can emerge from and co-exist with struggle, trauma, and grief and how these gatherings were ways in which people can be restored, sustained, and energized. We gathered with other Filipinos, other immigrants, to create found family.
These gatherings included birthday parties, church on Sundays, graduations, anniversaries, new homes, and other important life events. Gatherings were not exclusively about happy milestones. In my community of Filipino Catholics, deaths of loved ones spurred gatherings that included the viewings, the funeral, the reception, 40-day gathering, the one-year anniversary, and the annual celebration at All Souls’ Day which happened to coincide with Dia de los Muertos.
These gatherings were chaotic, emotional, loud (Filipinos and karaoke), intergenerational, colorful, and most of all they always had food — good food that really fills you up, food with tastes and textures that could bring you home, that brought feelings of childhood. Like any Filipino gathering there was more than enough food for leftovers. You could just “be Filipino.”
You left the gathering feeling nourished, feeling whole again with a sense of abundance, and energized as you headed back into the world.
And this is the aesthetic that has guided our design work with families and educators. This work emerged from a collaboration with educators in out-of-school programs in the Boston area. My collaborators and I had experiences engaging young people in computing experiences, but deep down, we recognized the vital role that families and other adult caregivers play in young people's lives.
Images from iterative implementations of Family Creative Learning from 2012-2015
While there were family programs that focused on basic computer access and literacy, which is essential and important, such activities can position families as consumers of technology putting them in a deficit position. Our focus was not so much on broadening participation in computing, but instead our focus was inviting families into a context of computing that welcomed their funds of knowledge and repertoires of practices across their everyday lives, families, and communities to position them as producers and creators of technologies. We wanted them to experience relevant, expansive, and alternative possibilities with computing.
And so we started to experiment with how we could invite their families into these spaces that honored their families, their identities, and their stories.
After several iterations and implementations, we settled on a model that we called Family Creative Learning (FCL). In my research group, we take an ecological perspective in how we approach learning design and, in this model, we intentionally brought together youth, their families, and educators and staff at their community-based organizations to learn and create together with technology. The program model invites families into a series of workshops, two hours a week, held at the community center.
Each workshop has a four part structure: Eat, Meet, Make, and Share.
In Eat, we start families with something that they’re familiar with — eating dinner together. Then in Meet, we independently check in with parents and kids. It allows them to connect with their peers, share questions and experiences. Then we bring them together for Make. We invite families to create projects based on their interests and stories. Over the years, we have engaged families in various creative technologies that were designed for children or novices such as Scratch, Makey Makey, ScratchJr, Circuit Playground Express, and neopixels. Then we invite them to Share their works in progress and to talk about their projects in their own words.
After our many iterations, we documented and shared this model widely through facilitator guides that we created for educators — not with the goal of scaling the model as-is, but for sharing what we learned about supporting families. We want educators to take pieces and remix elements that would make sense for their communities. Although, I would add that food is non-negotiable! (When I was first trying to find partners who would be interested in experimenting with family workshops, I found a lot of resistance from organizations — many doubted that parents would make the time, would show up, and if they did show up, wondered what role parents would play. I wanted to show them!) And this model has informed other implementations that include: PBS Kids Family Creative Learning, Google Code Next, Digital Youth Divas Caring Adult Network, and Scratch Family Creative Coding Nights.
A mother and her young daughter work on a ScratchJr project together.
What does transformation look like in FCL? Well in the context of this learning environment, we build on sociocultural perspectives on learning that emphasize learning as a relational and cultural process. (This perspective is in contrast to what many people often think of learning as an exclusively cognitive process — occurring in the head.)
Barbara Rogoff writes (1994): “Learning is a process of transformation of participation itself... how people develop is a function of their transforming roles and understanding in the activities.”
Over the years, we have conducted many studies into the ways that families learn using ethnographic methods to capture the emergent social and cultural dynamics in the workshops — and what has been striking is the identity development of children, adult caregivers, and even the educators and staff that facilitate the experience (Roque, Lin, & Liuzzi, 2016; Roque & Jain, 2018; Roque, 2020). We saw shifts in the ways they see themselves and each other in the context of computing as well as their relationships with the computational tools.
Images from iterative implementations of FCL from 2017-2023
For the sake of time, I’ll focus on parents. (I use parents loosely to mean any adult caregiver which can include grandparents, extended family, or family friends.) I have noticed that the transformation has been most pronounced for them, which of course has implications for their family dynamics. During the first workshop, when we have parents just meeting with other parents, we spend time getting to know each other but we also ask parents to share what comes to mind when they hear the words learning, technology, and creativity. Some parents share their concerns of what their children are doing with some technologies like games. Others share their anxieties of what role they can play to support their kids. Some parents, especially moms, shared stories of how they were often the ones who asked for help and described themselves as “illiterate” with technology and felt their kids saw them that way too. Some parents still carried traumas from the educational systems they were a part of and felt hesitant to take risks or try to learn new things. When it came to talking about creativity and imagination, it was something they did on the side like crafting or something that was “nice” but not essential.
In the first workshop, parents and children are introduced to tools independently so that they could each have time with the tools and materials on their own without worrying about each other. (In earlier versions, when we would start having families create together right away, many parents would sit back or their kids would monopolize the tools.)
Two mothers from two different families use various materials to work on their on a Makey Makey and Scratch project together.
One of my favorite parts of the program is when they all come back together. For many parents, this is their first time learning how to code and have been skeptical about their participation and nervous about being at the workshop, but came because their kids asked them to. Some were just participating in a program that introduced them to computer basics like sending an email or using word processing.
When the families reunite, the kids are eager to see what their parents made, pushing each aside to get a good look. The parents seem sheepish at first, but as they share, the tone of their voices and their bodies shift entirely as reactions from their kids and other families inspire laughter and smiles from parents.
A mother surrounded by kids and families laughs as she shares her project at the end of an FCL workshop.
This is a powerful experience for the parents, especially the moms, to show their kids and families that they too can create with computing. As one mom of three shared:
“[My son] was surprised I could do it. He thought I couldn’t do anything on the computer. When he saw that I made something, he was surprised that I made something. He said, “How did you do that? You made that?” He was amazed. He probably thought that he would come over and I would be lost. But I was like, ‘Oh I got it together.’”
And parents also get an opportunity to see their kids differently. As another mom of one shared:
“I just couldn’t believe how creative the kids -- you know, like this dry computer class, it’s gonna be so you know technical -- and then downstairs it was so interesting that they turned it into this really creative medium. Every single kid did something different.”
How powerful is it for adult caregivers in your life to not just “get it” but also appreciate and support you in your interests? Through our research and engagement with families, what has been most powerful in their experiences has been these shifts in how they see themselves and how they see each other. Parents who had shared their anxieties share what they were able to do and understand. As one mom shared: “I’m not just a mom. I’m also curious, playful, and creative.” At the same time, they can see that how creative their kids can be with computing. Their kids are able to see them differently and are excited about it. Kids share how impressed they are by their parents even if they were just able to do a little bit.
There’s power in that shift, in that transformation.
In their book Joyful Militancy, Montgomery and bergman argue that joy “is an increase in one's power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to do and feel more.”
Emotion is typically marginalized from traditional computing spaces. Instead, reason is prioritized over emotion, abstract over the concrete. In education literature, emotions are often positioned as something that supports other learning outcomes. But emotional transformation can be the end goal too. In FCL, joy is the aesthetic of the experience. Not joy as positivity or happiness, but joy from transformation, that emerges from the challenges and struggles they encounter as they create projects.
In our design work with families and educators, we see the ways that designing for joyful experiences has a lot of resonance with designing for transformative learning experiences, especially experiences that aim to support equitable, just, and humanizing learning experiences.
How do we design for Joy?
Computing environments typically look like this (below). This is the Athena cluster at the top floor of the student center when I was an undergraduate student at MIT. To get into the room, first you had to enter a code, which they changed occasionally. If you were unlucky and they just changed it, you had to go around asking people for the new code or solve a puzzle that was next to the door. It was stressful enough of an environment! When you entered it was smelly, body odor. And it was quiet. The lighting was a lot darker than what is pictured here. It felt pretty bleak as people worked at each computer. Computer science at MIT was also very white and male.
Image of MIT Athena cluster. Photo by philg@mit.edu.
I really struggled to feel liked I belonged when I was an undergraduate student. Like many minoritized students, I instead had strong feelings of being an imposter. It didn’t help that right before I went to MIT my AP Physics teacher said out loud to class that he was tired of only seeing girls get into MIT from my high school.
When I would visit nearby classrooms and community centers and their computing spaces, it often looked like this, pretty similar to what I experienced. There were typically rows of computers - all facing the same direction. Sometimes tables would be bolted down. It was quiet too. Students were wearing headphones so we can’t hear their computers. I’ve even seen rooms where there were physical dividers between each computer. Luckily it didn’t smell!
Computer room at a community center in a northeast urban area.
Some might see this arrangement and think “success!” — it looks very much like these elite spaces. Obviously, I don’t feel that way.
In the next set of slides, I’ll share some elements to our design thinking that we have felt have been important in designing spaces for joy with youth, families, and educators.
First I want to talk about WHO we are designing for joy.
There are many educational spaces and systems that try to police whose joy matters and what this joy can look like. adrienne marie brown in her book Pleasure Activism writes:
“Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.”
A young boy surrounded by kids, facilitators, and other adult caregivers as he shares his project in FCL.
And I want to emphasize why it matters to design for joy for those most impacted by oppression. Kristie Soares in her book Playful Protest emphasizes:
Joy can be “a politicized form of pleasure, one that not only produces gratification but also unsettles social norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
Kristie highlights that joy can be used precisely. Building on Audre Lorde's ideas of "precise anger", precise joy can be enacted deliberately for activist purposes.
Expansive and alternative visions of computing
Families and facilitators gather in various places around a colorful room with trays of food in the foreground.
When we design our learning environments, we aim for more expansive and alternative visions of computing that center play, joy, and relationships. How do we configure spaces to communicate who belongs, what is valued and prioritized, how people can act and interact—what’s expected behavior, who gets access to support, and who has authority? Building on the experiences of my family gatherings, when we arrange a learning environment, we design it to immediately signal to youth and families that they belong here.
As I mentioned before, I’m taking a highly visual approach to present our work. I’ll be showcasing photos in the next set of slides. As you take them in, I invite you to consider these questions.
Who is in the photo? How are bodies positioned in relation to others?
What materials are in the photo? Who is holding them and how?
What are each of their facial expressions and what emotions might they be expressing?
What perspective is the photo being taken from? What is being valued and communicated by the facilitator who took this photo?
Expansive tools and materials
When families enter, it smells like food. Food that feels warm and recognizable. Food that brings you home. We get feedback from staff and parents about what food we should order. You can hear music when you enter the room. We typically play Latin Jazz Orchestra music to set the mood. People are talking and eating, kids are moving around. It’s chaotic, but it’s organized chaos.
We arrange a space to have a central table or clusters of tables where people can eat, meet, make, and share. The arrangement makes it easy to see each other and what they are working on.
We also try to disrupt the hierarchy of materials. We curate materials so that there are materials that are familiar to them. We put them side-by-side. We want parents to see that a steel sponge that they can find in their kitchen, flowers, and Play-Doh, belong there as much as a Makey Makey or a computer.
Various materials (banana, green PlayDoh, steel sponge, and a flower in a plastic cup with water) connected to a Makey Makey board through alligator clips and a Scratch project in the background on a screen.
Expansive identities
So many educational spaces force students of color and other marginalized groups to assimilate and replace their cultures with dominant values and practices and many spaces artificially separate children from cultural and community resources that are needed to survive and thrive.
A mother surrounded by her three children as they discuss their family project while her son draws on a paper storyboard.
Much of the ways we structure activities in our workshops with youth and families center choice and agency while aiming to recognize that youth and families bring into the experience rich family, community, and cultural “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzales, 1992). Our role as facilitators of these environments is to support youth and families to navigate these funds of knowledge and the disciplinary ways of knowing and doing that they are also developing with computing in these experiences. Their funds of knowledge are the entry points in which we support them to create with technology. They are not learning technology for the sake of technology but really using it as a tool or another material to express themselves, their ideas, and their stories.
The design of our youth and family programs that we have developed with our community partners have been inspired by both constructionist perspectives on learning and learning design. Constructionist scholars argue that building personally meaningful things can facilitate the construction of knowledge — so as they build projects, they are building ideas.
Images of a family’s digital light play project. (Upper left) Their digital light play box as seen from the inside with various materials and lights. (Right) The digital light play project as seen from the outside, which the effects of the materials inside the box on display. (Bottom Left) A laptop with computer programming on MakeCode and a connected Circuit Playground Express.
For example, here are a series of pictures from a family project from FCL that was hosted at a library. We invited families to use light, everyday materials, and code (CircuitPlayground Express and programmable neopixels) to represent an important family story in a light box. This family created a light box about their family a trip to a street carnival. Other families created light boxes about camping trips together or other celebrations.
A mother with her young son and daughter stand by their light play project.
More importantly, they are building identities in the context of computing that doesn’t compromise who they are, where they come from, and who they are connected to.
Expansive relationships
So often educational environments position educators and learners in a transactional or maybe even in an oppositional relationship. Instead we want to expand what learning relationships can look like and who participates in those relationships. In our design work, my partners and I have learned that building relationships is just as important as building projects — and we’ve been intentional with our ecological approach to bring the different social spheres of community together.
In FCL, there are opportunities to build relationships within families, across families, between families and facilitators, and between families and the technologies. For example, during Parent Meet, adult caregivers connect exclusively with other adult caregivers, while their kids interact with other kids in a different room. This time and space for parents becomes a kind of support group. In one moment, parents are sharing anxieties of what they can do to really support their kids, and in another moment they're laughing each other about each other's projects.
In this photo (below), an uncle from another family is teasing another mom from a different family. She shared that she’s worried she’s going to get electrocuted by the Makey Makey. He decided to tease her and poked her with an alligator clip. She squealed with laughter so much that heads turned in the room, including her son’s face which had a look that said, “don’t embarrass me mom.”
A facilitator stands between two parents from two different families as they two parents laugh while working with the Makey Makey and Scratch.
There was also a lot of physical intimacy among families as kids sat on parents laps or siblings shared a chair. This is in contrast to how the built-environment in computing spaces tends to optimize the individual experience.
A young daughter sits on her mother’s lap as she shares a ScratchJr project about their family.
In a more recent project with Melissa Braaten from the School of Education at CU Boulder and led by graduate student Ronni Hayden from our Creative Communities research group, we have been inviting pre-service teachers, teacher candidates who are in their last year of their degree before they become certified, full-time teachers, into our library partners' makerspaces. For some of the teachers, these branches are situated in very similar kinds of neighborhoods that they student teach. For teachers, who often have limited and highly structured interactions with parents and adult caregivers through parent-teacher conferences, the chance to suddenly work with entire families, to see how children and their parents collaborate, and to listen to their stories as they create their projects — it's eye opening for them. As one teacher shared, adult caregivers "are whole people too."
A pre-service teacher helps a mother with her digital light play project.
We see high potential for joy to emerge in building relationships, especially when these relationships are cultivated in spaces that are grounded in love and solidarity. We can see the ways that their interactions can transforms roles, perspectives, and participation.
Expansive power
We want to expand what it means to be a learner and a teacher in these environments and blur and expand these roles. Facilitators in the space, which consists of staff at the community organizations and local volunteers, de-center their authority to be co-learners, co-creators. Facilitators are conscious of their body language, their use of words, the relationships they build, and how they position youth and families — to be creators, producers of their ideas.
We wanted to redistribute our power — from power over towards power to, with, for — to develop collective power in the experience.
Making joy visible
A mother touches documentation we curated and shared on a wall about her family’s participation in FCL
And finally, we make joy visible to families and facilitators in the space. So much of research is conducted in an extractive way. We collect extensive data about their experiences, take months or years to interpret it, and then share it with other academics. Instead, we invite families into our documentation process using the Reggio Emilia approach to documentation. Week to week, we collect documentation in the form of photos and notes and we curate and share them back with families to talk about it with each other and share any other stories that the documentation evokes. We then take the documentation to create a collective exhibit of families’ experiences to share it with their wider community.
How can joy be a sustaining force?
I wanted to close with thinking about what joy means for us — those of us engaging in equity-oriented, community-engaged design and research work, including our community partners. How can joy be a sustaining force?
Conducting community-engaged work can be both fulfilling and can be challenging. Building relationships is a core part of our partnership and co-design work. We develop relationships with our partners at our community organizations and with youth and families who are experiencing many challenges in their lives. As my team and I spend time with families and build relationships with them through the workshops and later in more intimate follow-up interviews, it’s hard not to be affected by their ups and downs — and to see ourselves and our loved ones in them.
To share some examples: in one of our community engagements, one young boy, who we came to love and who had a wonderful curiosity, got suspended for a week only because he was running in the hallways of his school. His suspension brought up feelings of anger in the research team and connected with our anger around the trends of young Black and Brown children often facing more disciplinary actions in schools.
Setting up before the start of an FCL workshop
The vulnerability we experience is not just with our participants, but also the vulnerability we experience personally and professionally within our institutions and academic communities. For example, many researchers have documented how precarious and suffocating it can be for scholars of color. Lionel Howard (2020) called this "researcher vulnerability" - feelings of distress (emotional, moral, physical) that can have implications for the research and even impact the researcher's life and sense of being.
Reflecting on the role of joy in activist and movement work, Montgomery and bergman write:
“What sustains struggles, spaces, and forms of life where we become capable of living and fighting in new ways? How are people carving out relationships based in trust, love, and responsibility amid the violence that permeates daily life? What sustains these worlds—what makes them thrive?”
I’ll share a few strategies that have been important to me and my collaborators to create joyful experiences for us too to sustain us in this work.
Opportunities to create and express ourselves
I have always found joy in the process of creation. There's a thrill in pulling things together and realizing your idea and then being able to share with others. We invite our educator partners to create with us and we position them as learners and creators - so that they can also experience the joy of creation.
When we are trying to figure out the design of an activity, we R&D with our educator partners and we explore the material possibilities together. Recently, our educator partners have been exploring the possibilities of weaving and fiber arts and it’s histories and connections with computing. It’s been a fun learning experience. And creating together can imbue the process with silliness, delight, and creativity.
Our educator partners from the ideaLAB makerspace network from Denver Public Library at a recent weaving workshop our Creative Communities research group hosted with the Unstable Design Lab
Being in community with families and educators
Being in community with families and educators has been an essential experience: spending time in the community spaces, sharing meals together, catching up with families week to week as the workshops progress, laughing together, sharing stories and interests, being in the present moment together.
In a conversation with colleagues about care and kinship in culturally resurgent research, Ananda Marin (2020) shares:
"Part of self-care, communal care or caregiving, is the process of giving gifts... I feel that one of the gifts families have given me that makes me know that I’m doing work that is okay, is like, is sharing how the research we have been engaged with has affected them personally."
One of these gifts has been witnessing families’ transformations and the joy that emerges from that — and knowing you were a part their creative process. Facilitators observe families, make suggestions, debug together, laugh at unexpected moments, and figure out an issue together.
Portraits of families with their ScratchJr projects after an implementation of FCL
But there are other gifts too: Their time, their stories with us - we get to learn about their larger lives and histories, their hopes and their dreams, sometimes they literally bring home-cooked meals. These are all gifts.
Ananda Marin continues that this gift giving is also a form of caregiving and the relationships we develop with youth and families are a form of caregiving in of themselves.
Buoyed by hope and possibility
The issues that we are trying to tackle can sometimes feel intractable, especially when we zoom out and see how the issues we are working on are inextricably tied to other wicked issues. Moments of joy can buoy our hopes, especially when moments of joy also reveal possibilities, some wiggle room for change, some squishy areas we can shape, or even present new futures or dreams. In our community-engaged and participatory work with families and educators, we find joy in the hope and possibilities that emerge from our collaborations.
In our recent work, we have been focused on making visible the work practices of our educator partners who go above and beyond their job description — one of which includes all the invisible labor they do to make sure their spaces feel welcoming and inclusive for the diverse communities they serve. Through interviews about how they try to incorporate computing in their spaces, we learned about the kinds of explicit and implicit equity oriented work they do. As we shared our research findings with with our partners, we noticed the productive dialog they were engaging in around the findings. We developed a zine called “What Equity Means to Me” to continue scaffolding these conversations.
(Left) Hadley ideaLAB makerspace from Denver Public Library. (Upper Right) Images of the “What Equity Means to Me Zine”. (Bottom Right) Educators discussing their reflections from an equity zine workshop at the 2022 Annual Clubhouse Network Conference.
Through the zine, there are reflective questions that ask educators to surface how their conceptions of equity show up concretely in their practice. Then they share their thoughts with their colleagues. As they do this, we engage in discussions that have productive tensions and share loving critique and strategies as they respond to the changing socio political context of their communities.
One of their supervisors told us these peer discussions about their equity work have pushed them to be more concrete when they talk about equity. That’s exciting because educators have a lot of power of what happens in their spaces from the moment-to-moment interactions to the built-environment.
Closing thoughts
Lately, I’ve been participating in so many panels and conversations around AI in K-12 education and what it will look like and what our role as designers, educators, and researchers should be. In one recent panel, someone asked me what metaphors or models should we consider as we incorporate AI into educational environments.
For me, the model has always been there. I continue to be inspired by the ways we gathered and how these spaces cultivated joy. The gatherings I experienced as a child with my family and other immigrant families have inspired me to think beyond and subvert the dominant ideas of what computing classrooms and labs — or any learning environment really — should look like, feel like, and sound like. They can be inviting, intergenerational, loud with stories, music, and laughter, honor where we come from and where we want to go, have too much food, welcome the full range of emotions, and be grounded in love and solidarity.
These gatherings also inform how I think about my roles as designer and researcher, especially as someone who leverages community-engaged approaches. Often, as new opportunities and technologies emerge, the knowledge and experiences of designers and researchers, who are predominantly white, male and Western, shape policies, programs, and infrastructures that go on to unevenly impact and marginalize vulnerable groups such as children and communities of color. I see inspiration from the role that my parents and other elders had in these gatherings: they were facilitators, organizers, and “authoritative hosts” (as Priya Parker from The Art of Gathering put it). As designers and researchers, we should instead decenter our knowledges and experiences and instead take on the role of facilitators, organizers, and hosts to bring a plurality of voices, knowledge, and experiences especially by those most impacted by oppression.
It’s been my family’s super power - to create spaces of joy - to humanize us, energize us, and sustain us for the work ahead. This super power has cultural roots that spans generations. In the Philippines, there is a pre-colonial tradition called Kamayan, a large communal feast where food is placed on banana leaves for everyone to eat. Kamayan means "with hands" and people eat with their hands. It’s intergenerational. It’s nourishing, abundant, and energizing. This tradition resisted and persisted through hundreds of years of colonization and erasure.
Kamayan photo by Ej Afable. CC BY-SA 4.0
This is a sensibility and tradition that will continue. Here’s an illustration from a book in my son’s collection: When Lola Visits. He is already learning about Kamayan and while we haven’t quite done a full Kamayan yet — (it’s a lot of work!) he’s definitely experienced the spirit of it in our family gatherings!
Kamayan, a page from the book When Lola Visits by Michelle Sterling and illustrated by Aaron Asis
Reading When Lola Visits with my son
And so I wanted to end with some takeaways for you:
Joy is a worthy outcome. And not joy as a static emotion like happiness or absent from other emotions, but instead one that is dynamic and in interplay and emerges from struggle. This emotional transformation is an important signal because there can be transformations in participation, identities, and power.
And these joyful experiences are especially important for those facing multiple oppressions. Joyful experiences are not just for surviving, but for thriving.
Designing for joy has resonance with work to design more just and humanizing learning experiences. To design for joy requires challenging the status quo to reimagine the relational, material, and political makeup of our learning experiences.
And finally, joy is a sustaining force. It is important for us who are engaged in this change work, who identify and resonate with the groups we work with. Joy is an energizing, humanizing, and sustaining force -- and it is contagious.
Acknowledgements
The work presented here was made possible by members of the Creative Communities research group and the Family Creative Learning team which spanned across graduate and undergraduate students in the Boston area (MIT, Wellesley, and Harvard) and from CU Boulder. Our collaborators include the ideaLAB makerspace networks at Denver Public Library, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, participating schools in Boulder Valley School District, the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, Caitlin Martin, Laura Devendorf and the Unstable Design Lab. And there are many more from the Boston area from when I was a graduate student starting FCL with educators there, such as the Clubhouse Network and the South End Technology Center.
Thank you to those who gave feedback including Ronni Hayden, Celeste Moreno, Mimi Shalf, Casey Hunt, Jaleesa Trapp, Rupal Jain, Natalie Rusk, Mitchel Resnick and other members of the Lifelong Kindergarten group, Brian Keegan, and Areej Mawasi.
These materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers (2005764, 1908351), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-96-17-0176-17), and the CU Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship.
My family, who have always rallied around me and each other. And finally, I want to thank the families and facilitators that ate, met, made, and shared with us over the years.
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