[P2P-F] Fwd: [platformcoop-discuss] Beyond "Diversity:" Design Justice & Platform Cooperativism?

Tue Aug 15 09:35:50 CEST 2017

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante at ecobytes.net>
Date: Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 11:52 PM
Subject: Fwd: [platformcoop-discuss] Beyond "Diversity:" Design Justice &
Platform Cooperativism?

I believe this message from a public mailing list (
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/platformcoop-discuss)

sets forward well some of the challenges faced, in what I would describe as
a form of political recuperation of concepts and practices till then
remaining mostly within certain subcultures.

I will highlight this excerpt :

"   Design takes place everywhere, but particular sites are valorized as
ideal-type locations for design practices. There is a growing literature
about, and increased discussion of, real world practices within
hackerspaces, hackathons, and design challenges.

*There has been a steady shift away from hacklabs as explicitly politicized
spaces at the intersection of social movement networks and geek communities
(Maxigas, 2012). Instead, startup culture and neoliberal discourses of
individual mastery and entrepreneurial citizenship have largely colonized
hackerspaces (Irani, 2015), even as city administrators have leveraged
technofetishism to create ‘innovation labs’ at the city level.* At the
same time, there has been a more recent move towards intentional
diversification of hacker and makerspaces, specifically along lines of
gender, race, and sexual orientation. Examples include Liberating
Ourselves Locally, Double Union, and more.

*However, in addition to the diversification of hacklab participants,
design justice requires a broader cultural shift, back towards intentional
linkage of these spaces and their practices to social movement networks. We
must interrogate the ideals, discourse, and practice of hackathons and
design challenges: what do people think or pretend hackathons do, and what
really happens at hackathons? How do we imagine them as more intentionally
liberatory and inclusive sites where design justice principles and
practices can be implemented?*  How do institutions frame ‘problems’ for
designers to
‘solve’ in ways that systematically invisibilize structural inequality,
history, and community strategies of innovation, resilience, and
organized resistance? Examples might include Hurricane Hackers, Occupy
Data Hackathons, MigraHack, and TransHack, as well as the DiscoTech
model (pioneered by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition) and the Make
the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon. Ultimately, we also need a shift
from deficit to asset based approaches to design scoping, and for the
formal inclusion of community members in design processes during scoping
and ‘challenge’ definition phases of a design cycle, not only during the
‘gathering ideas’ or ‘testing our solutions’ phases.  "

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sasha Costanza-Chock <schock at mit.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 3:54 PM
Subject: [platformcoop-discuss] Beyond "Diversity:" Design Justice &
Platform Cooperativism?
To: Enrique
Cc: Jovana , platformcoop-discuss at lists.riseup.net

Hi everyone,

In the wake of this weekend's white supremacist attack, I've been
thinking about the responsibility we have to push harder in every space
to have difficult conversations about the intersections of race, class,
gender, and other forms of structural inequality. In what ways are we,
as individuals, group members, business founders, cooperators, people
within institutions of various kinds, challenging these structures
explicitly, and in what ways are we reproducing them?

In light of that question, I'd like to share some draft text that I've
been working on about Design Justice, a framework to move beyond the
debate about 'diversity and inclusion' in tech work towards a deeper and
more comprehensive analysis of what's going on with the technological
reproduction of structural inequalities.

It's a long read but I hope that many on this list will engage with the
ideas here, especially as we think about how to work together to build
the kind of future economy that we would like, one that respects all
people, workers, and the planet.

Thank you,
Sasha

--

Notes on Design Justice and Digital Technologies
Sasha Costanza-Chock

(view as PDF: http://bit.ly/DJZine3Mockup )

    All aspects of politics have undeniably been reshaped by digital
technologies. Digital technologies have transformed both electoral
campaigns and everyday interactions between the populace and the State;
democratic deliberation and service delivery; highly mediated mass
protest events and the unglamorous, daily work of community organizing.
Unfortunately, the processes through which we currently develop, deploy,
and control digital technologies all but ensure that they will, on
balance, reproduce existing forms of structural power inequality.
Because of this, digital technologies currently pose little threat to
politics as usual under neoliberal democracy, or even, as we are
increasingly and uncomfortably aware, under authoritarian rule. Indeed,
as digital media platforms mature, both authoritarian states and
resurgent hard-right political formations within advanced democracies
have learned how to use them quite effectively to surveil social
movements and dissidents, sow fear and doubt through the deployment of
paid trolls and botnets, and amplify their own power. There is, however,
cause for optimism. If we take ‘politics’ in a broader sense to include
not only statecraft and governance from above, but also intersectional,
bottom-up social movements and contentious politics, then there is still
hope that digital technologies can serve as key tools for our collective
liberation. Those communities most targeted within what Patricia Hill
Collins calls the matrix of domination (the intersecting structures of
white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism)
already use digital technologies as tools to facilitate the formation of
new political identities, organizations, networks, and movements. These
movements have, in many cases, leveraged digital technologies to
mobilize adherents and allies, advance specific policy goals, and
transform culture at large. Yet if we are to realize the promise of
these tools, then we must fundamentally transform the ways that they are
designed.

    Design justice, an emergent concept that is being developed in large
part through the efforts of folks connected to the Allied Media
Conference, is a normative and pragmatic proposal for a liberatory
approach to the design of digital technologies, products, services, and
systems. Design justice proponents might argue that we have an ethical
imperative to systematically advance democratic participation in all
stages of the digital technology design process, and especially to
center historically marginalized communities in this process, based on
principles of democratic inclusion and social justice. At the same time,
design that follows these principles can produce products and systems
that work better for all of us, in the long run. We need to ask a series
of questions about how the design of digital technologies currently
works, and about how we want it to work. We need to raise questions of
accountability (who gets to do design? how do we move towards community
control of design processes?), values (what values do we encode and
reproduce in the objects and systems that we design?), discourse (What
stories do we tell about how things are designed? How do we scope design
challenges, and frame design problems?), sites (Where do we do design?
How do we make design sites accessible to those who will be most
impacted by design processes? What design sites are privileged and what
sites are ignored or marginalized?), political economy (who profits
from, and what social relationships are reproduced by, design?), and
pedagogy (how do we teach and learn design justice skills and
practices?) At the same time, we have to document innovative
community-led digital design practices, each grounded in the specificity
of a particular social movement. There is a growing community of
designers, technologists, and engaged scholars who work hand in hand
with community based organizations, through iterative stages of project
ideation, design, testing, evaluation, launch, and stewardship; we
invite you, the reader, to participate in these communities. Let’s work
towards design justice in theory, practice, and pedagogy.

    This approach should resonates strongly with the current widespread
rise of intersectional feminist thought and action, most visible in
networked social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, the immigrant
rights movement, LGBTQI struggles and Trans* rights, indigenous
struggles such as #IdleNoMore and #StandWithStandingRock, and new
formations in the labor movement, but also influential across the entire
political landscape in the linked resistence to the resurgent right in
the age of Trump. We might work to connect these movements more
explicitly to debates about technology design, and to deepen and extend
the range and impact of the already highly visible conversation about
the need for diversity in the technology sector. Let’s make visible the
growing community of design practitioners who are working in alignment
with today’s liberatory social movements, and inspire more designers to
join that community.

1. Design Justice: An Introduction

    Design Justice might initially be seen as part of a long turn
towards the theory and practice of User Centered Design, as well as the
more recent advance of value driven design, both increasingly popular
within industry. These shifts are important and have had the practical
outcome of producing products that better respond to user needs, and
that are designed with affordances that fit the values of design teams.
However, they don’t satisfy the normative or ethical goals of aligning
design with larger struggles to overturn the intersectional matrix of
domination (along lines of race, class, gender identity and sexual
orientation, disability, immigration status, and more), in part because
these approaches are too easily appropriated as extractive mechanisms by
oppressive institutions and systems. Design justice goes further than
previous proposals since it not only argues for equity in employment in
the design professions and for the intentional inclusion of values in
decisions about the affordances of designed objects and systems, it also
insists on community participation, leadership, and accountability
throughout the design process, as well as community ownership of digital
technologies and of the narratives about them.

2. “Nothing About Us, Without Us.” Design Accountability: Who
participates in, owns, and governs digital technology development?

    Next, we must explore the idea that the most valuable ‘ingredient’
in Design Justice is the full inclusion of people with direct lived
experience of the conditions the designers say they are trying to
change. We could summarize the recent state of knowledge on the raced,
classed, and gendered nature of employment in the technology sector, but
we also need to shift from an argument for equity (we need diverse
designers and software developers) to an argument for accountability
(those most affected by the outcomes should lead and own digital design
processes and products). The ‘participatory turn’ in technology design
includes intersecting histories of User-Led Innovation, Participatory
Design, and Feminist HCI (Von Hippel, 2005; Schuler and Namioka, 1993;
Bardzell, 2010). Case studies might include the disability justice
movement, whose activists popularized the phrase “Nothing About Us,
Without Us,” (Charlton, 1998) and ACT UP!, who transformed HIV treatment
through a potent mix of direct action, media savvy, and policy lobbying
(Shepard, 2002). The key lessons include: involving members of the
community that is most directly affected by the issue that you are
focusing on is crucial, both because it’s ethical, and also because the
tacit and experiential knowledge of community members is sure to produce
ideas, approaches and innovations that a non-member of the community
would be very unlikely to come up with. It’s possible to create formal
community accountability mechanisms in design processes. This is
especially urgent to do when working with historically marginalized
communities, but applies to any and all design processes. The vast
majority of community-based organizations don’t feel like they have the
resources, skills, or time to participate in technology design. This
doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing design, that they can’t do design,
or that it doesn’t make sense to try and include them in a design
process focused on an area that they work in; it means that a Design
Justice framework requires doing the work to gather resources that will
enable community participation and shared ownership.

3. “Hard-coding Liberation.” Design Values: What values do we encode and
reproduce in the digital objects and systems that we design?

    We also have to explore the ways that values are reproduced in the
affordances of the objects, processes, and systems that we design. Here
we could turn to the literature on affordances (Gibson, 1977), and build
on feminist and antiracist strands within science and technology studies
to unpack recent examples of the ways that intersecting forms of
oppression, including white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and
settler colonialism, are constantly hard-coded into designed objects
(Wajcman, 2010). This typically takes place not because designers are
intentionally ‘malicious,’ but through unintentional mechanisms,
including assumptions about the ‘unmarked’ end-user, the use of
systematically biased datasets to train algorithms using machine
learning techniques, and limited feedback loops. The increased
visibility of ‘values in design’ (Friedman, 1997) is an important shift
in design thinking and practice, and design justice further extends this
approach. While values in design urges us to consider the ways that we
hard-code oppressive values and norms into technological affordances,
design justice adds an emphasis on the transformative potential of
broader participation in the design process, as well as attention to
ultimate ownership, stewardship, and accrual of benefits from designed
objects and systems.

4. “From TXTMob to Twitter.” Design Discourse: What stories do we tell
about the design of digital technologies

    Stories have power. For example, contrast the ‘official’ Twitter
origin story (one of the founders had a brilliant blue-sky flash of
genius) with counternarratives from developers who were part of the
process (anarchist activists created the demo design for Twitter as a
tool to help affinity groups stay one step ahead of the cops in the NYC
Republican National Convention actions of 2004; see Siles, 2013). The
key point is that innovation in media technology, like all technological
innovation, is an interplay between users and tool developers, not a
top-down process. Social movements, in particular, have always been a
hotbed of innovation in media tools and practices, in part because of
the relationship between the media industries and social movement
(mis)representation. Social movements, especially when led by
marginalized communities, are systematically ignored and misrepresented
in the mass media, so movements often form strong community media
practices, create active counterpublics, and develop media innovations
out of necessity (Downing, 2000). Many social movement media innovations
are later adopted by the journalism profession and by the broader
cultural industries, although stripped of their original
counterhegemonic intent. Examples include Indymedia and CNN iReports,
TxtMob and Twitter, and DIY livestreams from DeepDish TV to Occupy
(GlobalRevolution, Timcast) to Periscope and FaceBook Live. We have to
tell these stories, so that our contributions to the history of
technology development aren’t erased.

5. “Making the Breast Pump Not Suck.” Design Sites: Where do we create
new digital technologies?

    Design takes place everywhere, but particular sites are valorized as
ideal-type locations for design practices. There is a growing literature
about, and increased discussion of, real world practices within
hackerspaces, hackathons, and design challenges. There has been a steady
shift away from hacklabs as explicitly politicized spaces at the
intersection of social movement networks and geek communities (Maxigas,
2012). Instead, startup culture and neoliberal discourses of individual
mastery and entrepreneurial citizenship have largely colonized
hackerspaces (Irani, 2015), even as city administrators have leveraged
technofetishism to create ‘innovation labs’ at the city level. At the
same time, there has been a more recent move towards intentional
diversification of hacker and makerspaces, specifically along lines of
gender, race, and sexual orientation. Examples include Liberating
Ourselves Locally, Double Union, and more. However, in addition to the
diversification of hacklab participants, design justice requires a
broader cultural shift, back towards intentional linkage of these spaces
and their practices to social movement networks. We must interrogate the
ideals, discourse, and practice of hackathons and design challenges:
what do people think or pretend hackathons do, and what really happens
at hackathons? How do we imagine them as more intentionally liberatory
and inclusive sites where design justice principles and  practices can
be implemented?  How do institutions frame ‘problems’ for designers to
‘solve’ in ways that systematically invisibilize structural inequality,
history, and community strategies of innovation, resilience, and
organized resistance? Examples might include Hurricane Hackers, Occupy
Data Hackathons, MigraHack, and TransHack, as well as the DiscoTech
model (pioneered by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition) and the Make
the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon. Ultimately, we also need a shift
from deficit to asset based approaches to design scoping, and for the
formal inclusion of community members in design processes during scoping
and ‘challenge’ definition phases of a design cycle, not only during the
‘gathering ideas’ or ‘testing our solutions’ phases.

6. “Platform Cooperativism.” Critical Political Economy of Design: How
does the design of digital technologies reproduce or challenge the
relations of production?

    Design is a key ‘moment’ in the reproduction of social and economic
relationships and social control under white supremacist capitalist
heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism. At the same time, there is a
growing conversation about platform cooperativism vs. the so-called
‘sharing economy’ (Scholz and Schneider, 2016).  We need to consider the
application of design justice principles to labor market platform
development. The main point is that platform ownership is a key source
of capitalist profitability and worker exploitation, and that
counterstrategies include organic self-organization, platform organizing
by labor unions, and platform cooperativism. Examples include
Turkopticon, SherpaShare, Contratados.org, Care.com’s partnership with
NDWA, the development of apps by taxi worker cooperatives, and so on.
Design justice, applied to the development of digital labor markets,
requires that designers and developers involve workers, worker advocacy
organizations, and cooperatives from the beginning in the design of
(cooperative, worker owned) platforms in various sectors. Platform
cooperativism is an important proposal with a growing group of
adherents. At the same time, platform cooperativism will not be able to
advance as a liberatory project if it fails to fully incorporate an
intersectional feminist analysis of capitalism.

7. Design Pedagogy: How do we teach and learn Design Justice?

    Finally, it is a moment that requires reflection on a critical
pedagogy of design justice. We might begin with critical pedagogy and
popular education, based in work by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell
hooks, and place these ideas in dialogue with design education
practitioners and theorists such as Seymour Pappert and Mitchel Resnick,
as well as actually existing design justice pedagogy as practices in
spaces like the Detroit Community Technology Project, the MIT
Collaborative Design Studio, and elsewhere. What would it mean for
institutional structures to support a community-engaged pedagogy of
technology design? What are the challenges in an age of the
neoliberalization of the educational system? Personally when I think
about this area I draw from my own experience creating and teaching the
Civic Media: Co-Design Studio course, that I developed and have taught
since 2012 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(codesign.mit.edu). I’m hoping we can build more of a public dialogue
about what a pedagogy of design justice looks like in practice.

8. Design Justice: Conclusions

    By default, digital technologies are designed in ways that reproduce
existing forms of structural inequality. Only through conscious and
coordinated intervention can we bend the arc of digital technology
development towards justice. There are many mechanisms at work in this
process: designers, intended benificiaries, scope, values, discourse,
sites, governance, and other aspects of the development, deployment, and
use of digital technology are all structured by race, class, gender
identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, geography,
and other intersecting axes of inequality. Power reproduces itself
through the stories about technology design that we center (design
discourse); who we pay to design and develop digital technologies
(employment inequity); the imagined ‘end users’ for whom we design the
majority of digital technologies (design benificiaries); the
affordances, features, presets, intentional and unintentional biases
that we encode into digital technologies (encoded values); the inclusion
and exclusion of various kinds of people from the places and spaces
where we design digital technologies (design sites); the allocation of
decisionmaking power over the digital technologies in our lives
(governance), and more. There is also a growing community of design
justice practitioners: people, organizations, and networks that already
work on a daily basis to realize design justice principles in practice.
This zine includes the principles of design justice as developed through
the Design Justice Network Gathering at Allied Media Conference. Those
principles are a living document, and we hope to continue to develop
them together. We might also explore how to evaluate design according to
those principles, and we urge the reader to consider how these
principles might apply to their own work. Let’s build theory, practice,
and pedagogy of Design Justice together!

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