Designing for the Marginalized

Abstract

When refugees and asylum seekers start new lives in a host community, they face many challenges and often rely on others for help. ICT can play a significant role to empower and support them in their new lives. In this paper, we focus on understanding the challenges that refugees and asylum seekers face in order to build a comprehensive perspective to design suitable technologies. As a first step, we carried out a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 7 participants: 5 refugees and asylum seekers and 2 activists. Our preliminary findings show that there are three common themes that affect such demography: (1) Social isolation, (2) Cultural backdrops, and (3) The role of technology. Based on this, we provide some early insights into designing an innovative ICT platform to empower refugees and asylum seekers for their social inclusion in the host society.