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Recently, there has been a large body of research exploring the possibilities of digital fabrication and making in school context. To truly embrace the spirit of equity and democracy so essential to the maker movement, more research is needed concerning how these activities can be used to empower marginalized and at-risk groups. In this paper, we introduce preliminary insights from Make4Change project, that aims to strengthen the social inclusion and employability of unemployed, young people and immigrants outside the labor market through digital fabrication and making. We use the criteria for empowerment of participants as a tool to reflect the planning, organization, and execution of learning activities and on improving our process moving forward. We believe that insights from Make4Change will be useful to practitioners and researchers looking to empower underrepresented, marginal, or at-risk populations through making.

Living labs are environments for acquiring user feedback on new products and services. Virtual environments can complement living labs by providing dynamic immersive setup for depicting change. This paper describes implementation of Virtual and Augmented Reality clients as an extension to a user involvement tool for an existing living lab. We conducted a user experience study with 14 participants to compare the clients. According to our study, the virtual reality client was experienced as innovative, easy to use, entertaining and fun. Whereas the augmented reality client was perceived playful and empowering.

Children provide innovative insights and perspectives when designing and evaluating prospective technologies and interaction methods. However, working with children as design informants requires careful consideration of the methodologies used in different steps of the design process. In this paper, we present our insights on a case-study of a design process with 24 children (9-12-year-olds), aiming for understanding children's view on new technologies and their perception on tangible interaction. We utilized a lightweight design process model: children first reflected on the use of technologies and participated in an ideation session. Based on the results, researchers built prototypes which were evaluated by the children in the final step of the process. We expect our learnings to help researchers in the field of collaborative design when organizing design activities with children.

Recently, there has been a large body of research exploring the possibilities of digital fabrication and making in school context. To truly embrace the spirit of equity and democracy so essential to the maker movement, more research is needed concerning how these activities can be used to empower marginalized and at-risk groups. In this paper, we introduce preliminary insights from Make4Change project, that aims to strengthen the social inclusion and employability of unemployed, young people and immigrants outside the labor market through digital fabrication and making. We use the criteria for empowerment of participants as a tool to reflect the planning, organization, and execution of learning activities and on improving our process moving forward. We believe that insights from Make4Change will be useful to practitioners and researchers looking to empower underrepresented, marginal, or at-risk populations through making.CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered Computing • Human computer interaction (HCI) • Empirical studies in HCI