Hi, my name is Kirsten Bray and I am a graduate research
assistant at the Paul's equity and health innovations design
research lab.
Over the past year, I have been working with Dr. Christina N.
Harrington and a wonderful team of researchers to develop a
toolkit to help community design practitioners and their
collectives engage in participatory design methods and
future speculation.
Historically, technology and design fields have not always
been accessible. The US Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission's analysis in 2014 EEO-1 data reported that black
employees in the tech and design fields were critically
underrepresented in the United States, making up around 7% of
the workforce.
Researchers such as a Ogburu et al, Sturm et al, and Winchester
have also commented on the need for more diverse engagements and
design as a whole.
Participatory design methods and probes have helped bridge some
of these gaps.
By exploring complex issues with the communities designs are
intended to serve our research discussions, conversations
around race and representation in these methods, as well as the
relationships between academic or industry designers and the
communities they work with.
When employing participatory design methods, researchers in
the US have identified barriers tied to race and class.
Black and brown designers underrepresented in these fields
find additional barriers to engaging with design.
These can be found in exclusive design terminology, and
accessible methodologies, or even in preconceived notions of
who should be leading when generating knowledge.
We begin our work with the question of how designers and
researchers and industry and academia use toolkits to support
engagements in design by communities underrepresented in
these fields.
More specifically, we asked how we might employ a speculative
design toolkit to support equity and who gets to design and shift
the way black and brown communities see themselves
within the process of speculation and futuring.
We assert that afrofuturism can be used as a valuable framework
and participatory speculative practices. speculative design is
a powerful tool that employs the use of future fictional
narratives to allow creators to re evaluate social and cultural
contexts.
Design probes encouraging design methodology, speculation and
critical thinking have supported the work community design
practitioners are already doing, combining the strength of design
thinking with a desire to tackle complex social and cultural
issues. With us aim to explore the ways that successfully shift
the inception of this probing into the hands of the
communities they aim to serve.
We are now seeing more of a push across media and academic
disciplines to engage with afrofuturism as a lens for
counteracting historical marginalization, and reframing
who shapes the future and who is included in it.
Using Winchester is called to include the black ethos, and
Ogburu's critical engagement with race, we explored how
designers might use afrofuturism as a lens in speculative design
to reflect on who is seen and represented in design methods.
Speculative design allows people to explore design possibilities
and solutions to present a social problems by envisioning
alternative futures.
Similarly, afrofuturism is a genre of speculative fiction
that intentionally explores features created by and
featuring pan-African experiences. Because of this
when considering speculative design, we were drawn to
Afrofuturism as a lens for encouraging more equitable
speculative design.
By deliberately examining how race and social context shaped
our present and future, we can explore narratives that
acknowledge existing inequity while leveraging the existing
strengths within these communities.
Our integration of afrofuturism revolved around the following
key tenants, eliminating past cultural competence defining
liberation, counter storytelling, critical
imagination and equitable futures.
Using these elements to guide our work, we formed cards for
community designers to use within their collectives.
When engaging in speculation. toolkit we developed driven past
research conducted in the lab, working with young adults in
Chicago and a series of speculation workshops.
The designs participants came up with were documented in the
guide book that helped facilitate the futuring process.
The workshops illuminated how cultural identity can play a
pivotal role in speculation.
Attendees' critical speculative fictions address social concerns
and consider the ways that oppressions could be replicated
through technology.
They also underscored the importance of encouraging
flexible design engagements outside of a formal research
setting.
Therefore, when considering our next steps, we wanted to
consider a new medium that could be used by non designers and
designers like we chose cards that are medium because they can
be made publicly available with open source digital versions.
They offer the benefits of in person engagement, and they can
help facilitate collaborative design with others in ways that
have a low barrier to entry.
We use categories for card decks that reflect these proposed
dimensions and incorporate design methods and our Building
Utopia toolkit.
We created five decks, forecasting topics liberation
methods, and technology and solutions decks. The forecasting
cards frame a timeline for design speculation and encourage
groups to think about how we might address past and present
and justices to create actionable futures.
The topic stack situates community related topics that
are culturally meaningful and focus on both negative
challenges and positive areas as well.
The liberation deck asks groups to define their own liberation
examining how knowledge can be taken from their own experiences
and brought into design.
The methods deck features cards with a variety of symbol
ideation exercises to impart design methods and encourage
storytelling.
Finally, the technology and solution stack includes
technical and non technical design solutions that might be
used when considering design features.
We also incorporated blank cards so participants would not be
limited to our own perceptions of relevant topics, prompts or
methods. We imagined three potential use cases for this
toolkit.
Firstly, we believe denizen designers practicing everyday
rather than formalized design may use this toolkit to address
concerns that are personal to them and their cultural identity
using an accessible tool designed to generate meaningful
ideation.
Community design practitioners can also use these cards in
workshops and community events to create futures with their
collectives, and generate plans of action geared towards their
visions of the future.
Finally, design practitioners and industry and academia may
use these prompts among themselves to reflect on how
design impacts both their own communities and communities they
may not identify with.
By sharing open resources that recognize and validate knowledge
generation and social concerns of marginalized populations,
designers can foster collaborative relationships with
communities and share knowledge with people who are the experts
on their own lived experiences.
Our work on this toolkit illuminates a method of applying
afrofuturism and speculation as lens well positioned to
encourage conscious engagement with race design and futures
thinking.
According to Afrofuturist writer Ytasha Womack Afrofuturism is an
intersection of imagination, technology, the future and
liberation. And so afrofuturism may help to build a world we're
all designers as well.
Thank you.