Christina N. Harrington

Christina Harrington (she/her) is a designer and qualitative researcher who works at the intersection of interaction design and health and racial equity. She combines her background in electrical engineering and industrial design to focus on the areas of universal, accessible, and inclusive design. Specifically, she looks at how to use design in the development of products to support historically excluded groups such as Black and LatinX communities, older adults, and individuals with differing abilities in maintaining their health, wellness, and autonomy in defining their future. Christina is passionate about using design to center communities that have historically been at the margins of mainstream design. She looks to methods such as design justice and community collectivism to broaden and amplify participation in design by addressing the barriers that corporate approaches to design have placed on our ability to see design as a universal language of communication and knowledge.
Authored Publications
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    Participatory AI Considerations for Advancing Racial Health Equity
    Andrea G. Parker
    Jatin Alla
    Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2025) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Health-related artificial intelligence (health AI) systems are being rapidly created, largely without input from racially minoritized communities who experience persistent health inequities and stand to be negatively affected if these systems are poorly designed. Addressing this problematic trend, we critically review prior work focused on the participatory design of health AI innovations (participatory AI research), surfacing eight gaps in this work that inhibit racial health equity and provide strategies for addressing these gaps. Our strategies emphasize that “participation” in design must go beyond typical focus areas of data collection, annotation, and application co-design, to also include co-generating overarching health AI agendas and policies. Further, participatory AI methods must prioritize community-centered design that supports collaborative learning around health equity and AI, addresses root causes of inequity and AI stakeholder power dynamics, centers relationalism and emotion, supports flourishing, and facilitates longitudinal design. These strategies will help catalyze research that advances racial health equity. View details