Adrian Petterson

Design equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators’ perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.

Universities grow increasingly committed to equal access for individuals with disabilities, balancing the appearance of inclusion while upholding values of academic rigour. Within these universities, employees working in accessibility must mediate an unstable web of organizational and technological infrastructures. This study examines the government mandates, organizational structures, processes, and policies in a research university in Canada aimed at meeting the accessibility needs of its students. Our findings suggest that there is an interplay between informal and formal practices to navigate institutional systems. Technology serves as a mediator in the ''behind-the-scenes'' work that occurs at the intersection of infrastructures. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to better support accessibility work in universities. We suggest the use of seamful design to support accessibility work, as it aligns with the dynamic nature of disability and distributed networks of accessibility work. We recommend designers foster interdependence to support workers who navigate overlapping infrastructures and breakdowns at the seams.

Healthcare providers play a crucial role in developing care plans for patients at the end of their lives. As value elicitation becomes increasingly integrated into advance care planning, digital tools have been proposed to support providers. However, the development of these tools has primarily focused on facilitating communication of values from patients to providers. To address providers' specific needs and barriers, such as using values to create and manage medical care plans, we conducted an exploratory study capturing provider perspectives. Through interviews with 18 palliative care providers, we identified what they consider the typical value elicitation process, its associated challenges, and their visions for an ideal future process. To guide future research in determining priority areas for technology intervention, we synthesized our findings into a conceptual model that visualizes the tasks of providers in value elicitation. Comparing our model with previous models focused on patient and caregiver tasks, we found that provider perspectives introduce additional tasks in value elicitation that warrant attention: the creation, member-checking, and formal documentation of care plans by providers. Based on our findings, we argue that future work should focus on designing digital tools that support the provider-specific tasks of care plan creation and management to improve value elicitation.