A Collective Win-State for the Community and the Players: Facilitating a Co-Creative Design Process with the Boston Ujima Project, 2019

"Within one of the nation's most racially segregated cities, the Boston Ujima Project is an organization that feels a sense of urgency and responsibility to unlock the innovation potential trapped in Boston's poverty-stricken communities. The Boston Ujima Project operates with a paradoxical joyful militancy (bergman, Montgomery, 2017) to redistribute the financial power to communities of color who have been long displaced.​ This thesis explores how a community and organization-driven design process, centering the voices of the disempowered individuals powering it, can unlock civic imagination (Jenkins, et. al, 2016) to motivate marginalized voices to value abundance over scarcity, feel empowered as experts in their lived experiences, and be moved to civic participation through a tabletop card game. To illustrate the importance of human-centered design, this thesis demonstrates how value-driven designers utilize an emergent strategy approach (brown, 2018) to produce an emancipatory learning (Freire, 1970) experience in a group setting. Our ultimate goal was to create meaningful interactions for members of a growing movement to return wealth to working class communities of color." -- Abstract