Community Workshop and Design Crit Topics from 2025
Topic | Format | Facilitator | Date | Time | Links / Notes | Coordinator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Creating tools that foster design beyond empathy | Community Workshop | Niklas Frost | Sep 23, 2025 | 2 - 3pm ET |  Discussing explorations in creating design tools that attempt to facilitate design processes that are more inclusive towards underserved groups, specifically blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals. One of the projects is BlindBox which is a design kit aimed at co-creation of mobile interfaces with blind and visually impaired individuals. For BlindBox, we "converted" common UI wireframe elements into tactile elements that could act as translational objects between BVI and seeing individuals.
Another project is a browser plugin that shows one element of a website at the time. It is meant to mimic the experience of BVI individuals using websites in a visual format designers are used to rather, than as an auditory format. | @Justin Obara @Daniel Cho |
Exploring the experiences of racialized children and youth with disabilities with a Canadian national survey | Community Workshop | De-Lawrence Lamptey | Jul 29, 2025 | 2 - 3pm ET |
| @Justin Obara @Daniel Cho |
From Fragments to Fractals: Peer-Led AI, Storytelling, and Inclusive Mental Health Futures | Community Workshop | Tracy Windsor | Jul 15, 2025 | 2 - 3pm ET |
From Fragments to Fractals (FFtF) is a participatory research and storytelling project that gathers, traces, and synthesizes diverse knowledge fragments related to mental health broadly, and a particular focus on psychosis, and peer support—from training manuals to academic articles to lived experience reflections in recorded interviews, focus groups, etc. Will likely use AI for analysis, which the tools for REFRACT AI will be trained on. The project centers liberatory ethics, values consent and citation, and aims to build an open-source repository that honors grassroots wisdom alongside academic knowledge. While the initial phase focuses on psychosis-related materials, the platform is designed to grow and welcome content across mental health, social care, and community healing spaces. REFRACT AI is the digital constellation that will emerge from this repository: a peer-led, modular suite of tools that support narrative exploration, skills practice (e.g. DBT/CBT), decision-making, and ethical system navigation. These tools adapt to user role (peer supporter, clinician, etc.) and are grounded in inclusive, relational design practices. Will share the conceptual foundations of both projects and open up space for dialogue on:
Links shared by participants:
| @Justin Obara @Daniel Cho |
