Community-Responsive Approaches to Fostering AI Understanding

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly prevalent, ensuring equitable AI understanding across diverse communities presents a critical challenge. Current engagement approaches rely on standardized designs that tend to fail to account for varying community characteristics, potentially perpetuating digital divides. Through practice, this research explores and examines a community-responsive approach, integrating participatory design with citizen science values. This approach suggests the potential for mutual benefit where researchers obtain diverse data while communities develop AI understanding. We designed and tested workshops across five distinct communities—deaf students, museum visitors, elderly members, co-working space users, and university researchers—using a gamified gaze estimation system to examine how social contexts influence technological engagement outcomes. Our findings indicate that identical technologies generate different outcomes based on community characteristics, with success rates varying significantly (participation ranging from 44% to 100%). Community managers appeared to serve as valuable cultural intermediaries, with established partnerships showing higher engagement rates. The workshops suggested that mutual value exchange could potentially occur—participants showed improvements in AI understanding while researchers collected diverse facial image data and community-specific AI ideas. However, effective community-responsive design appears to require continuous adaptation based on community feedback and longer-term relationship building rather than transactional interactions, with implementation success appearing to vary based on community contexts and prior relationships. This research contributes practical guidance for community-responsive design and demonstrates how participatory principles can potentially create inclusive educational experiences, while highlighting the importance of sustained partnership development for bridging digital divides and serving dual goals of learning and social empowerment.