{"id":17432,"date":"2020-03-05T04:59:57","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T04:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=17432"},"modified":"2020-06-09T12:10:36","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T12:10:36","slug":"design-power-and-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/design-power-and-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Design, power, and justice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In new book \u201cDesign Justice,\u201d Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock examines how to make technology work for more people in society.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Sasha Costanza-Chock goes through airport security, it is an unusually uncomfortable experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Costanza-Chock, an MIT associate professor, is transgender and nonbinary. They use the pronouns they\/them, and their body does not match binary norms. But airport security millimeter wave scanners are set up with binary, male\/female configurations. To operate the machine, agents press a button based on their assumptions about the person entering the scanner: blue for \u201cboy,\u201d or pink for \u201cgirl.\u201d\u00a0 The machine nearly always flags Costanza-Chock for a hands-on check by security officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know I\u2019m almost certainly about to experience an embarrassing, uncomfortable, and perhaps humiliating search \u2026 after my body is flagged as anomalous by the millimeter wave scanner,\u201d they write, recounting one such episode, in a new book about technology, design, and social justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an experience familiar to many who fall outside the system\u2019s norms, Costanza-Chock explains: Trans and gender nonconforming people\u2019s bodies, black women\u2019s hair, head wraps, and assistive devices are regularly flagged as \u201crisky.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The airport security scanner is just one type of problem that emerges when technology does not match social reality. There are biases built into everyday objects, including software interfaces, medical devices, social media, and the built environment, and these biases reflect existing power structures in society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new book \u2014 \u201cDesign Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need<\/a>,\u201d published by the MIT Press \u2014 looks broadly at such shortcomings and offers a framework for fixing them while lifting up methods of technology design that can be used to help build a more inclusive future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDesign justice is both a community of practice, and a framework for analysis,\u201d says Costanza-Chock, who is the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in MIT\u2019s Comparative Media Studies\/Writing program. \u201cIn the book I\u2019m trying to both narrate the emergence of this community, based on my own participation in it, and rethink some of the core concepts from design theory through this lens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who designs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book has its roots in the activities of the Design Justice Network (DJN), founded in 2016 with the aim of \u201crethinking design processes so they center people who are often marginalized by design,\u201d in the organization\u2019s own description. (Costanza-Chock sits on the DJN\u2019s steering committee.) The book draws on the concepts of intersectional feminism and the idea that technologies, and society more broadly, are structured by what the black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins calls a \u201cmatrix of domination\u201d in the form of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book also looks at the issue of who designs technology, a subject Costanza-Chock has examined extensively \u2014 for instance in the 2018 report \u201c#MoreThanCode,\u201d which pointed out the need for more systematic inclusion and equity efforts in the emerging field of public interest technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is a growing conversation about the lack of intersectional racial and gender diversity in the tech sector,\u201d notes Costanza-Chock. \u201cMany Silicon Valley firms are now producing diversity statistics every year. \u2026\u00a0 But just because it\u2019s being recognized doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s going to be solved any time soon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem of designing fairly for society is not as simple as diversifying that workforce, however.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDesign justice goes farther,\u201d Costanza-Chock says. \u201cEven if we had extremely diverse teams of people working inside Silicon Valley, they would by and large still be mostly organizing their time and energy around producing products that would be attractive to a very thin slice of the global population \u2014 people who have disposable income, always-on internet connectivity, and broadband.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the two problems are related, and \u201cDesign Justice\u201d references a wide range of innovation areas where a lack of design inclusivity generates problematic products. Many product users have long had to devise ad-hoc improvements to technology themselves. For instance, nurses have often been prolific innovators, tinkering with medical devices \u2014 a phenomenon partly unearthed, the book notes, by Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-director of MIT\u2019s Little Devices Lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery day, all around us, people are innovating in small and large ways, based on everyday needs,\u201d Costanza-Chock reflects. Although that\u2019s not what we hear from tech firms, which often circulate narratives \u201cabout a lone genius inventor, who had a \u2018eureka\u2019 moment and created a product and brought it into the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, in one widely circulated story, Twitter\u2019s origins flow from a flash of insight by co-founder Jack Dorsey. Another version assigns its beginnings to hackers and activists of the Indymedia network and to then-MIT researcher Tad Hirsch, who in 2004 created a tool for protestors called TXTMob, which served as the demo design for the first Twitter prototype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not making a claim in the book for the one true origin story,\u201d explains Costanza-Chock. \u201cI\u2019m emphasizing that technological innovation and design processes are quite messy, and that people are often marginalized from the stories we hear about the creation of new tools. Social movements are often hotbeds of innovation, but their contributions aren’t always recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Better hackathons and more collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Costanza-Chock does believe that design processes can be made more inclusive. In the book, they draw on years of experience teaching the\u00a0MIT Collaborative Design Studio\u00a0<\/a>to synthesize lessons for inclusive innovation. For example: Try staging a hackathon that is more inclusive than the usual format of marathon sessions catered only to twenty-something coders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI really enjoy hackathons, and I have participated in many of them myself,\u201d Costanza-Chock says. \u201cThat said, hackathons \u2026 tend to be dominated by certain kinds of people. They tend to be gendered, more accessible to younger people who don\u2019t have kids, can take an entire day or weekend for free labor, and who can survive on pizza and soda.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether designing a hackathon or building a long-term design team, \u201cThere are many ways to be better and more inclusive,\u201d Costanza-Chock adds. \u201cYou need people with domain experience in the areas you\u2019re working on, personal experience, or deep knowledge from study. If you\u2019re working on Boston\u2019s urban transit systems, you need to have people from different places in those systems on your designs teams, from the MBTA [Boston\u2019s transit authority] to people that ride transit on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Costanza-Chock, for one, hopes the book will interest people not only for the criticism it offers, but as a way of moving forward and deploying better practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy book is not primarily or only critique,\u201d Costanza-Chock says. \u201cOne of the things about the Design Justice Network is that we try to spend more time building than tearing down. I think design justice is about articulating a critique, while constantly trying to point toward ways of doing things better.\u201d<\/p>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In new book \u201cDesign Justice,\u201d Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock examines how to make technology work for more people in society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice-550x360.jpg",550,360,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice-95x65.jpg",95,65,true],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",639,426,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/design-power-justice.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"Education<\/a> News<\/a>","tag_info":"News","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}