Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
While varying degrees of participatory methods are often explored by the HCI community to enable design with different user groups, this paper seeks to add weight to the burgeoning demand for community-led design when engaging with diverse groups at the intersections of marginalisation. This paper presents a 24-month-long qualitative study, where the authors observed a community-based organisation that empowers refugee and migrant women in Australia through making. We report how the organisation led its own process to pivot from face-to-face to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the design and delivery of an app and the intersectional challenges faced by the women as they learnt to navigate online making. This paper expands feminist intersectional praxis in HCI to new contexts and critiques the positionality of researchers in this work. It contributes to the literature on design justice, providing an exemplar of how community-led design more effectively dismantl...
Intersectional Design: Design As a Tool For Social Equity
INCLUDE 2022. Unheard Voices 11 th Inclusive Design Conference Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, 2022
Today, we recognise in law and corporate practice that we must address discrimination by race, gender, sex, and other identity indicators. The 'design industry' directly shapes people's lived experiences. However, surveys show that the field lacks diversity. A comparison of existing methodologies also suggests a lacking awareness and capability of critically engaging with social responsibility. As a result, design can contribute to paradigms of oppression and discrimination. This study proposes participatory design methods enabling explicit consideration of end-users structural identities and pressures. Some of its key components include the radical inclusion of marginalised stakeholders or canvases for mapping oppressions based on the intersectional theory and analysis of power dynamics surrounding the design context. The framework was co-designed in workshops with diverse stakeholders. We tested the process in an accelerated co-design case study, through semistructured interviews and think-aloud testing with practising design experts. The early framework effectively and productively included marginalised stakeholders in 'reimagining' a sexist tradition and achieved positive appraisal, good fidelity and practicable outcomes. It also raised exciting questions about its applicability by other designers; transferability across different contexts; and commercial integration.
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Design research is geYng interested in social movements in recent years. Organizing tacScs like coaliSon-building have been taken from civil rights movements and turned into operaSve concepts such as designing coaliSons that point towards converging interests. As such, this concept cannot support social movements, which are not formed by common interests, but by pressing social needs ignored in official and everyday poliScs. This advances further the revision of the designing coaliSon concept based on feminist literature and on the authors' experience in weaving the Design & Oppression Network in Brazil. This network was formed in 2020 by design professors, students, and professionals from all over Brazil, as well as from other countries. From its incepSon, the network was concerned with the LaSn-American reality-colonized, culturally invaded, underdeveloped, and oppressed in various ways by the Global North. The network approaches design as a pedagogical and criScal process so that the producSon of design space becomes an opportunity for listening, reflecSon, dispute, synthesis, mutual care, and insurgence acSons against all forms of oppression. From this experience, we propose the alternaSve concept of insurgent design coaliSons to deepen design engagements with social movements.
Design and Culture, 2018
The Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics, and Power Symposium, organized by the Decolonising Design Group and hosted by Malmö University School of Arts and Communication in 2016, explored colonial oppression through overlapping theories and practices in design relating to gender, race, language, culture, and ethnicity. Over two days, participants examined intersectionality theory and debated how a myriad of forces might influence calls for epistemic decolonization in design. This conference review highlights some of the presentations and debates through the lens of the role of allies in resisting cultural oppression in design.
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DRS2020: Synergy, 2020
There is a growing synergy between design research and social justice. As design moves from commercial contexts into the community, we become advocates for creating more inclusive and equitable systems. But the traditionally nonpolitical posture of design practice leaves us ill-equipped for approaching complex challenges. Learning new approaches to be open to other perspectives improves our insights and fosters deeper collaboration. Without an awareness of historical privilege and oppression, we can unintentionally harm the people with whom we collaborate. Design Research practices are not yet considerate of people at the margins-people we may be working side by side with to unravel wicked problems. Drawing from multi-cultural psychology and design for social justice, I propose ways that collaborative design projects can be more aware of power and equity throughout the process.
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Focusing on the relation between design and power requires us to understand the designer’s role and position. Based on an understanding of design as ideological and political, we focus on the designer’s position from an intersectional feminist perspective. We present two design objects that aim to critically intervene into agency and power structures, and we analyse how the designer’s position impacts this intervention. With this case, we demonstrate how a simple argument – that what you design is always influenced by your (lack of) privilege – becomes complex when understood in the concrete design practice. The paper contributes with a critical reflection on how a designer is always part of a construction of power and
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2023
With increased focus on historically excluded populations, there have been recent calls for HCI research methods to more adequately acknowledge and address the historical context of racism, sexism, gendered racism, epistemic violence, classism, etc. In this paper, we utilize Black feminist epistemologies to serve as critical frameworks for understanding the historical context that reveals the interconnected systems of power that mutually inluence one another to create unequal outcomes or social inequalities for diferent populations. Leveraging Black feminist thought and intersectionality as critical social theories of design praxis, we introduce intersectional analysis of powerÐa method that enables HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to identify and situate saturated sites of violence in a historical context and to transform the ways in which they engage with populations that have been historically oppressed. Engaging in self-relection as researchers, we apply an intersectional analysis of power to co-design technologies with community street outreach workers who address violence in their predominantly Black communities. We: 1) identify the saturated site of violence; 2) identify the intersecting systems of power and who holds power (past and present); 3) describe the łconceptual gluež that binds these intersecting systems together and the assumption(s) that those who hold power are employing to guide their interactions; 4) examine the ways in which Black people are subjugated, surveilled and/or expected to assimilate to łnormativež ways of being and behaving; and 5) identify acts of resistance. This paper contributes an alternative to traditional HCI and design methods that falsely perpetuate a lens of neutrality and colorblindness that centers whiteness, innovation, and capitalism and ignores the history of State sanctioned violence and structural oppression. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.
Toward Equitable Participatory Design
Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
CSCW, like many other academic communities, is reckoning with its roles, responsibilities, and practices amidst 2020's multiple pandemics of COVID-19, anti-Black racism, and a global economic crisis. Reviewing our work with data and communities demands we address harms from overexposure caused by surveillance or algorithmic bias and from underexposure caused by design that is insufficiently participatory and equitable. This workshop will elicit narratives of good and bad design and data work with communities, apply the lenses of equitable participatory design and data feminism to current CSCW projects and our global context, and develop practical outputs for supporting academics and practitioners in pursuit of democratic and just partnerships. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.