Introduction:

Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

• designing is fundamental to being human
• we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us
• everyone designs, but only some kinds of design is acknowledged, valorized, remunerated, credited
• speculative: envisioning, manipulating the future
• design thinking deployed to reproduce colonial political economy

Intersectionality

• Black Women:
  • could not represent all women
  • could not represent all Black people
  • viewed discrimination as only “single-identity”
  • since not enough Black women, could not statistically show discrimination claims
• single-axis analysis: race, class, gender as independent construct
• most design principles and practices => single-axis framework
• design justice analysis: not to make systems more inclusive, but to refuse to design them at all

Matrix of Domination

• race, class, gender as interlocking systems of oppression
• benefits and harms based on location within matrix of domination
• situated knowledge over universalit knowledge
  • no group has clear angle of vision, possesses theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute truth or declare its theories and methodologies as universal norm

1 Design values: Hard-Coding Liberation

Put another way, why do we continue to design technologies that reproduce existing systems of power inequality when it is so clear to so many that we urgently need to dismantle those systems?

• affordances: object’s properties that show the possible actions user’s can take with it => how they may interact with the object
• capitalism has shaped the design of objects
• is given affordance equally available to all people?
• disaffordances: match perceptual cues with actions that will be blocked or constrained
  • dysaffordances: user must misidentify to access object’s functions
• design justice is not about intentionality, it’s about process and outcomes
• discriminatory design: spirometer had “race correction” button because it was thought race determined lung capacity
  • Black workers had to show more severe clinical outcomes than white workers
• healthcare as male-focussed: artificial heart it 86% of men but only 20% of women

Instead, we might say that design constantly instantiates power inequality via technological affordances, across domains, in ways both big and small.

• value-sensitive design: freedom from bias
  • preexisting bias, technical bias, emergent bias

“What is the responsibility of the designer when the client wants to build bias into a system?” They conclude that systems should be evaluated for “freedom from bias” and that such evaluation should be incorporated into standards, curriculum, and society-­wide testing: “Because biased computer systems are instruments of injustice … we believe that freedom from bias should be counted among the select set of criteria according to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged. … As with other criteria for good computer systems, such as reliability, accuracy, and efficiency, freedom from bias should be held out as an ideal.”

• universal design:
  • large part due to Disabled activists work to make accessible spaces

objects, places, and systems we design must be accessible to the widest possible set of potential users.

“the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.”

UD discourse emphasizes that we should try to design for everybody and that by including those who are often excluded from design considerations, we can make objects, places, and systems that ultimately function better for all people. Disability jus- tice shares that goal, but also acknowledges both that some people are always advantaged and others disadvantaged by any given design, and that this distribution is influenced by intersecting structures of race, class, gender, and disability.

Instead of masking this reality, design justice practitioners seek to make it explicit: we prioritize design work that shifts advantages to those who are currently systematically disadvantaged within the matrix of domination.

• inclusive design: > “design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference.”

recognizes human diversity, respects the uniqueness of each individual, and acknowledges that a given individual might experience different interactions with the same design interface or object depending on the context.

Disability is “a mismatch between the needs of the individual and the design of the product, system or service. With this framing, disability can be experienced by anyone excluded by the design.

• accessible: ability of design/system to match the requirements of the individual => you can’t determine if something is accessible unless you know the user, context and goal
• “one size fits one” over “one size fits all”
  • “segregated solutions” are not economically and technically sustainable however
  • in digital domain => adaptive design
• culturally adaptive systems:

However, in practice this approach also leads to the reproduction and reification of existing social categories through algorithmic surveillance, tracking users across sites, gathering and selling their data, and the development of filter bubbles (only showing users content that we believe they are comfortable with).

Universalization erases difference and produces self-­reinforcing spirals of exclusion, but personalized and culturally adaptive systems too often are deployed in ways that reinforce surveillance capitalism.

• design justice: making intentional decisions about which users we choose to center and be held accountable for those choices
• A/B testing is always deployed within universalist design paradigm.

First, we should critique (trouble, queer, or denormalize) the assump- tion that A/B testing is always geared toward improving UX, for the simple reason that it is actually geared toward increasing the decision-­ making power of the product designer.

2 Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us”

Third (and most salient here), prominent critiques of the Google memo, like most stories about sexism and racism in Silicon Valley, are typically framed in terms of the untapped capacity of women, Black people, Indigenous people, and/or people of color (B/I/PoC), to per- form well in jobs currently dominated by white and Asian cisgender men. Many laud the benefits of “diverse teams” for capitalist profit- ability.

Sexist and racist discourse and practice within the technology industry are nearly always delinked from broader and deeper critiques of the ways that tech reproduces white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism—­ not only through employment practices, but through all aspects of technology design.

• design as a human activity

The wants and needs of young, healthy, middle-­class people with connections and a reasonable amount of spare cash are overrepresented among Start-­up City’s priorities. For one thing, those are the problems with solutions that sell. For another, given a few million dollars and a team of semi-­geniuses, those problems are easy to solve. Structural social injustice and systemic racism are harder to tackle.

User-­centered design (UCD) refers to a design process that is “based upon an explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments; is driven and refined by user-­centered evaluation; and addresses the whole user experience.

However, UCD faces a paradox: it prioritizes “real-­world users.” Yet if, for broader reasons of structural inequality, the universe of real-­world users falls within a limited range compared to the full breadth of potential users, then UCD reproduces exclusion by centering their needs.

designers tend to unconsciously default to imag- ined users whose experiences are similar to their own.

even diverse design teams tend to default to imagined users who belong to the dominant social group.

• stand-in strategy: user personas