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Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions

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Published:23 April 2020Publication History

ABSTRACT

Transgender and non-binary people face substantial challenges in the world, ranging from social inequities and discrimination to lack of access to resources. Though technology cannot fully solve these problems, technological solutions may help to address some of the challenges trans people and communities face. We conducted a series of participatory design sessions (total N = 21 participants) to understand trans people's most pressing challenges and to involve this population in the design process. We detail four types of technologies trans people envision: technologies for changing bodies, technologies for changing appearances / gender expressions, technologies for safety, and technologies for finding resources. We found that centering trans people in the design process enabled inclusive technology design that primarily focused on sharing community resources and prioritized connection between community members.

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
            April 2020
            10688 pages
            ISBN:9781450367080
            DOI:10.1145/3313831

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            • Published: 23 April 2020

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