#1023: Extending Freeze Framing: A Socio-Spatial Approach to Co-Designing Youth-Centered Out-of-School Time Incentives

This poster examines a youth-centered incentive design project from Evanston, Illinois’s participatory budgeting process, which allocated $75,000 to support high school students’ access to OST learning. We define incentives not as rewards for thin measures of participation, but as equitable scaffolds: material, social, and symbolic supports that make meaningful participation more reachable. Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, we analyze how a breakdown in Mappenings, the intended geocapture app, became a productive contradiction that expanded Freeze Framing beyond a single sociotechnical tool. The pivot to narrative reflections, annotated maps, and privacy-preserving composite personas made visible the connective tissue of youth OST lives - transportation, safety, family labor, belonging, time, and self-directed interest. We argue that Freeze Framing's greater utility lies in its portable activity structure, which can surface youth-authored evidence across multiple mediations and translate that evidence into more dignified, equity-aligned incentive logics.