Today we're going to be presenting on "Designing Trans Technology: Defining
Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions." I'm going to
introduce Zu Weinger who's going to be presenting the first part here.
Hello, I'm Zu. I'm a student at the University of Michigan and I worked with Oliver on
this project. We did this research because technologies are not
designed for trans people and we want to note that when we use the word
trans we mean people whose current genders are different than those that
were assigned to them at birth and explicitly includes non-binary
people which we included in the study. Being trans and using technology
brings up a lot of different challenges since technologies are generally not
created with the intention of including trans people and supporting their
experiences. Trans people face unique challenges in everyday life and when
using technology due to the gender transition process which may involve
social, physical, and/or legal changes like name changes and also transphobia,
discrimination, violence, algorithmic bias, and lack of resources.
So a question that we had was how can social technologies be designed with and
for trans communities. Our two main research questions - We sought to
understand challenges trans individuals and communities faced and how technology
can be designed to support these needs and challenges, and we did this by
addressing these research questions. How can technology best support trans
individuals and communities and meet their needs? And what types of future
trans technologies do trans people envision? Future making through design
involves brainstorming a list of critiques to the current situation, and
in this case the challenges that trans people face in society and in many areas
of life including technology, and then transforming those critiques to positive
outcomes. So we conducted participatory design sessions focusing on future
making through design with three sessions - two of them held here in
Ann Arbor and one in Philadelphia during the Trans Wellness Conference - which were
two hours each, and we compensated participants with a $40 gift card and
meal or snacks. And we have the demographics of our participants below -
21 people total. So we asked the participants if we could take photos
during on our participatory design sessions and this is what it looked like
when we were having participants draw out their technologies. So our first
activity included writing on post-it notes
what challenges is our community facing and this prompt was meant to create
different categories that we could come up with through so after we asked this
question we categorized them and did collaborative affinity diagramming
that was led by the participants. And here are a few examples of what they
looked like. So we have Healthcare as one where people say "competent healthcare
providers" and "no therapy," and then the other one listed is Work and Money where
people have "unemployment," "no money no jobs." So we have a total of 13
categories that we found when we were doing the affinity diagramming and so
the main the first one was access to society, which include restroom access
and being safe in physical spaces. Financial and employment challenges, such
as barriers to employment and binary job applications. Gatekeeping, such as not
feeling trans enough or transphobia within LGB spaces. Healthcare, such as
lack of trans competent providers. Next one was housing which included housing
discrimination and affordable housing. Lack of access to resources, which
are also listed before like health care, housing, foods. Lack of respect for
one's identity which includes people using incorrect names or pronouns.
Online identity was our next one, including a difficulty of expressing
trans identity online and privacy and anonymity.
Police was our next category, including harassment by police and police violence. Pressure to educate
cisgender people about trans identities, such as lack of existing educational
resources. Our next one was racial injustice, including white supremacy and
anti-Blackness. Violence, including murder of trans women of color and harassment.
And our final category was miscellaneous challenges which didn't fit into any of
the above categories, such as lack of access to trans history and trans
experiences being marginal to cisgender experiences. So after we did this
activity with challenges we led participants through a Word Associations
Through Brain-writing activity we asked participants these two big
questions: What ideas come to mind when we say trans technology, and How might
technology address some of the challenges that we discussed. During this
activity people would write down an idea that they had about these two questions,
and then they would pass the note card to the person on their right and the
person on the right would expand or build on the idea that was first written.
And people would collaborate a really brainstorm sketch and present the work
to the group once we had about five ideas on each card. So we came up with
four different categories of trans technologies. The first was technologies
for changing bodies, the next was technologies for changing appearances
and gender expressions. And the difference here is the first category is
more about physical changes, and the next category is more about people's
appearances and how they express gender. The third category was technologies for
safety and then finally technologies for finding resources.
So in our first category participants in the design sessions expressed the need
to have autonomy over their gender expression regarding their physical body
and their identity, and so they envisioned technology to address this. So
one example was a body changing laboratory and participants said that
this is where "you can step into a machine and it will like you change and
reshape your body. This machine allows us to apply for lack of better words
whatever is that you would like to apply or enhance on yourself." So though gender
confirmation surgery happens frequently in trans communities, what makes this
design different is the technological and do-it-yourself nature of a body
changing laboratory. So while this design idea is clearly very speculative and may
not be technologically feasible, it provides important insight into the need
to give trans people more control and agency over transition-related health
care needs. The next category is technologies for changing appearances
and gender expressions. So some participants were considering more
physical rather than digital approaches to wearable technology design. Many
participants described experiences they had with not being able to buy clothing
that was particularly catered for trans people, and described ways to design
clothing to address trans-specific challenges. So one participant said that
this technology "changes the appearance based on what you prefer at the moment.
So it can have a padding illusion, or binding, you can change the pattern of
the clothing as well as the shape like whether you want a dress or tank top or
shorts." And the participant said "maybe a practical thing could be just clothes
they can be folded or manipulated in such a way so that they could be a
different shape. It doesn't necessarily have to be that high tech... if there's
reversible coats, I'm sure that idea could be taken in another direction.
Another idea involved a necklace with interchangeable pronoun labels that
would flash in certain colors when a person was misgendered. And it also
includes a smokescreen canister that enables the wear to
disappear if necessary. Participants also envisioned mirrors and glasses that could
change a person's view of themselves or their experience in the world. This was
sort of an extension on the body changing design ideas. Participants
suggested things like augmented glasses and mirror technologies that allow a
person to view themselves as they envision their gender, and to see how
potential body changes would look before actually going through with the
procedures. So one participant said "you start by seeing in a mirror so you can
change how you want to see it first before you go into the machine and
change it." In addition to changes to one's own appearance, augmented
technology could also change people's experiences with others. For instance,
being able to view one's world differently than the world that they actually
experience on a day-to-day basis. One participant said, "what if you had glasses
where you can see yourself in society as you would like to see yourself in
society and you couldn't see transphobia, you couldn't see transmisogyny or any
other ism." Our next category was technologies for safety, and a primary
challenge that participants mentioned during the design sessions was their
concern for safety, and this was particularly about fears of violence in
public spaces. So participants envisioned a community-based technological
application that involved as they said, "Some type of hotline or device that
enables guardian angels to be alerted when violence occurs." "It would confirm an
appropriate or effective justice is done... that actually holds police accountable."
Our final category was technologies for finding resources. To address this
challenge of finding resources, several different groups of participants
designed what they called a Trans Yelp. Such a site or app would offer
an online space for trans people to rate and review local businesses. Additionally,
it would enable trans people to find information about trans-friendly
restrooms, affordable housing, health care assistance, affordable food, etc. And
because this idea was raised by multiple groups of participants, we saw a few
different variations. So one group sketched a Trans Yelp that focused solely
on healthcare resources and finding trans-friendly and trans-competent
doctors. Another group drafted a Trans Yelp that centered Black trans people that
they called BTF. And those participants said, "Are they specifically queer spaces?
I also added a potential filter, down to are they friendly to queer and trans
people of color, specifically? And on there, you can have resources about why
you need queer spaces why you need spaces specifically for queer people of
color. so to recap, our four categories of trans
technologies are listed here, and many of the designs that we described above,
whether there were things like traditional sites or apps, or wearable
technology, physical technology, augmented reality, or futuristic form altering
technologies, many of them included community based aspects in serious ways.
And this signifies that trans technology design must reach beyond design for
individuals to design for communities and consider how community members can
use technology to support each other. Additionally this line of work is an
example of what Dombrowski et al. call "social justice-oriented interaction
design," in which HCI design is "not just about technological possibility, but also
about political responsibility." Designing with trans people to address trans
challenges is a social justice issue in which marginalized people's experiences
of systemic oppression are at the forefront. And
additionally, because many participants in our study were Black or were of
additional marginalized races or ethnicities, we can't separate racial
inequities from our findings. Race figured prominently in participants' design ideations.
So when we described describe trans technologies and how to design them, what
this means is intersectional trans technologies that also center
marginalized races, ethnicities, and additional salient identity facets. To
summarize, although technology can't solve the difficult challenges that
trans people and communities face, it can in some ways improve trans people's
lives. Technology can help to provide space and support that enable trans
people to express and change bodies, appearances, and gender presentations; to
maintain safety; share resources; and connect with other community members. So
the next steps for our project, we're going to be prototyping some of these
technology designs and doing some follow-up design sessions. And
importantly designing trans technologies must involve maintaining connections with
community members, designing with them, and making sure that they have a voice
in the design process. So I want to thank you all for being here, and thanks the
organizers and also thanks to the Michigan Institute for Research on Women
and Gender for funding this work. And we are happy to take questions.