Participatory Design for Intergenerational Culture Exchange in Immigrant Families: How Collaborative Narration and Creation Fosters Democratic Engagement

Language and cultural barriers critically threaten the social relationships between grandparents and grandchildren in immigrant families. Cultural exchange activities, like shared storytelling, can foster these crucial connections. However, existing barriers make these seemingly routine interactions challenging for families to navigate. The resulting intergenerational drift places grandparents at high risk of sustained social isolation from their families. Past works have presented technology-mediated supports for grandparent-grandchild social interactions in non-immigrant families and have found that these interventions do foster stronger connections in both physically close and distant multigenerational families. We explore how to support the specific needs of immigrant families through Magic Thing participatory design workshops with grandchildren and grandparents together in order to reveal the social interactions that would support their cultural exchange. We use the Magic Thing to move the standard dialogic grandparent-grandchild relationship into a trialogic one, creating space for comfortable social connection and storytelling through the shared creation of the design. We find that technology-mediated support of intergenerational immigrant cultural exchange must be designed for this trialogic process, consider the role of expressing values as a form of meta-commentary on a story, and shift the perspective on existing "barriers" to consider how they might foster further engagement.

语言和文化障碍严重威胁着移民家庭中祖孙之间的社会关系。文化交流活动，比如共同讲故事，可以促进这些关键的联系。然而，现有的障碍使得这些看似平常的互动对于家庭来说难以驾驭。由此产生的代际隔阂使祖父母面临与家人长期社会隔离的高风险。以往的研究为非移民家庭中的祖孙社交互动提供了技术介导的支持，并发现这些干预措施确实促进了在身体亲近和距离较远的多代同堂家庭中更紧密的联系。我们通过让祖孙一起参与“魔法物品”设计工作坊来探索如何满足移民家庭的特定需求，以揭示有助于他们文化交流的社交互动。我们利用“魔法物品”将标准的祖孙对话关系转变为三方对话关系，通过共同设计创造舒适的社交联系和讲故事的空间。我们发现，针对代际移民文化交流的技术介导支持必须针对这种三方对话过程进行设计，考虑将价值观表达作为对故事的一种元评论形式的作用，并转变对现有“障碍”的看法，思考它们如何可能促进进一步的参与。