Inclusive digital innovation through community technology in underserved communities

The big issues

Our project asks: Can VR and XR technology, when deployed as a digital design method, enhance current Community Technology practices to further the inclusive and innovative design of safe online digital spaces for women from underserved communities?

One current research study at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures suggests that Community Technology, as a diverse and mutable sociodigital practice, offers the potential for communities to reimagine the futures that are possible for themselves.

The project builds on work carried out by Women Rise Up, a CIC based in Blackburn Lancashire, to create an online digital platform for leadership development.

The CIC reports, in evidence collated so far from working with women in their community, that opportunities for leadership development are often culturally inappropriate, tend to undervalue lived experiences, and are reductive about the skills developed though roles held in their community and the implicit knowledge that comes from these roles.

The CIC believes that an inclusive digital online leadership platform could offer the potential to develop skills, contacts, and appropriate training in a safe and mutually constituted culturally appropriate online space.

They are clear about the value and purpose that a platform like this could offer but want to deploy speculative design and digital methods that engage with tech, like VR or XR, to explore the possibilities it presents to support a radical design process.

In addition, the project investigates how these methods might generate alternatives to the often suboptimal futures presented by others for underserved communities more broadly, towards ones that are preferred and desired by these communities themselves. 

Our response 

Our project will curate and codesign three events:  

• First, a methods workshop in the neutral lab at BDFI, bringing together external specialists in digital inclusion (Diversily), researchers of VR using SOMA (CenSoF), and members of Women Rise Up CiC. This will explore methods to develop modes of imagination of bodies and identity, “level the design playing field”, use body mapping, SOMA VR work, and VR painting.  

• Secondly, an experiential workshop will follow, using the neutral lab facilities, that introduces women who are lead practitioners to the BDFI space to experience XR and VR technology. Deploying the methods that we have developed in the first workshop, we consider how might these tools deploy speculative design of digital spaces in the complex and intersectional context of leadership development and inclusion. 

• The third event will be co-designed as a result of the second experiential workshop. This workshop will work with women from different leadership settings to explore and interrogate the emerging speculative designs using VR and XR tech developed in event two.  

These workshops will inform the work with local web designers in Blackburn to develop a design proposal for further prototyping and piloting. 

Progress Update (July 2025)

All three of our planned seedcorn project workshops have successfully taken place over the last nine months. Our first workshop took place (November 2024) in the Neutral Lab at BDFI in which we explored methods to develop ways for us to imagine our bodies and identities, using SOMA VR to engage with the experience of VR technology with care and exploring questions and issues of inclusion. The project team made up of Matt and Lisa from UoB and Penelope, Sharon, and Faira, were joined by Marissa Ellis from Diversily who was able to offer an external view of the work that we intend to do as the project unfolded.

Our second experiential workshop (April 2025) used the Neutral Lab facilities once more to run the explorative work that we had designed in the first workshop. Deploying the methods that we developed and on-boarding three more women who were invited by Penelope, Sharon, and Faira, we used the SOMA VR practice to think about digital spaces, exploration in virtual worlds, bodies and movement, and the complexity of navigating VR tech for the first time. 

Our third workshop took place in Preston at AMRC AMRC North West | AMRC (May 2025) with twelve women in total (the group comprised of the six who had already taken part and six colleagues or friends from their community). Building on the experiences of the project team and participants from the second workshop, we explored SOMA VR as a practice to develop trust, shape positive and creative relationships through VR. In addition, we considered the use of VR and its possibilities for leadership, personal development, and other relational interventions.

We hope to share some of the themes that have emerged from these workshops in our final project report. Beyond this, we want to continue to develop inclusive approaches to digital design that are founded on relationships, care, reciprocity, and context and which can be applied in the context of the work that Women Rise Up do. We are thinking strategically about the next step for funding this exciting work and then ideas that have emerged from the seedcorn phase of this project.