Questions on Design, Social Justice and Breastpumps

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...

Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design's benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.

Design and Culture, 2020

Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems-and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we restructured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems.

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.

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 2020

Women account for over half of the global population, however, continue to be subject to systematic and 4 systemic disadvantage, particularly in terms of access to health and education. At every intersection, where 5 systemic inequality accounts for greater loss of life or limitations on full and healthy living, women are 6 more greatly impacted by those inequalities. The design of technologies is no different, the very definition of 7 technology is historically cast in terms of male activities, and advancements in the field are critical to improve 8 women’s quality of life. This article views HCI, a relatively new field, as well positioned to act critically in 9 the ways that technology serve, refigure, and redefine women’s bodies. Indeed, the female body remains 10 a contested topic, a restriction to the development of women’s health. On one hand, the field of women’s 11 health has attended to the medicalization of the body and therefore is to be understood through medical 12 language and knowledge. On the other hand, the framing of issues associated with women’s health and 13 people’s experiences of and within such system(s) remain problematic for many. This is visible today in, e.g., 14 socio-cultural practices in disparate geographies or medical devices within a clinic or the home. Moreover, the 15 biological body is part of a great unmentionable, i.e., the perils of essentialism. We contend that it is necessary, 16 pragmatically and ethically, for HCI to turn its attention toward a woman-centered design approach. While 17 previous research has argued for the dangers of gender-demarcated design work, we advance that designing 18 for and with women should not be regarded as ghettoizing, but instead as critical to improving women’s 19 experiences in bodily transactions, choices, rights, and access to and in health and care. In this article, we 20 consider how and why designing with and for woman matters. We use our design-led research as a way to 21 speak to and illustrate alternatives to designing for and with women within HCI.

Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems-and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we restructured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems.

…technology only expands human capabilities when appropriately embedded in wider social and physical structures.

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.

This thesis examines how dominant and exclusionary design practices operate within systems of power, how these maintain experiences of privilege and oppression, and how these might be challenged through a systematic implementation of intersectional feminist thought in design processes. A three-phased qualitative study was conducted. Phase 1 involves a critical literature review of intersectionality and how forms of dominant design operate, including the Double Diamond model. Phase 2 includes an analysis of three design approaches, Design Justice, Data Feminism and Towards an