Hi, I’m Richmond Wong, I’m a postdoc at the UC Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity.
In this paper, I show how design fiction can be used to analyze and reflect on ethnographic
data. I call this usage “design fiction memos.” The paper presents a case study
using design fiction memos in a project studying user experience professionals who try to engage
with values and ethical issues in their work. In qualitative analysis, memo writing can
help provide a step between collecting data and formal written analysis, helping the researcher
reflect on and make sense of large amounts of qualitative data. Memos allow a researcher
to start closely in their data, abstract away from it, then reflexively come back to their
data. This paper deploys design fiction in a similar
way. Design fiction is a practice of creating fictional worlds by depicting conceptual artifacts
that help ask questions about configurations of that world, helping a designer think about
issues such as power relationships and social values.
While design fictions often come from the imagination of its designers and creators,
this paper suggests creating design fictions stemming from qualitative empirical data.
With design fiction memos, researchers start close to their qualitative data, then move
away from it by creating and exploring a fictional world inspired by that data. Then the researcher
can come back to their data with new insights. Design fiction memos are meant to be created
throughout the data collection and analysis process as a thinking tool, rather than being
the final design outcome of a qualitative research process.
I present an example using design fiction memos in a project studying the work practices
of user experience professionals who advocate for addressing values and ethical issues from
their positions within their companies, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. I interviewed
12 UX professionals predominantly working at large technology companies in the US, and
conducted observations at UX meetup events. While analyzing the data, I created design
fiction memos that depict corporate practices. These includes fictional corporate emails,
interfaces of workplace software, and corporate websites and posters. I’ll briefly discuss
one, the ethics work tracker. This imagined interface allows someone to
track work tasks related to values and ethics. Each square represents a day and a darker
squares indicate more “contributions” to values and ethics work. Here are Jen’s
details for one day, where she tracks things like attending a product meeting where she
presented a set of user personas around accessibility, but she also had to explain accessibility
laws to co-workers. She notes that she got interrupted 3 times by a coworker.
This design fiction helps reflect on the everyday work of surfacing values. And
that this labor is often invisible and unrecognized. This was inspired in part by a senior UX researcher
who talked about creating an “ethical debt tracker” using bug tracking software. Tracking
these issues as “bugs” makes values and ethical issues visible to co-workers, but
perhaps as problems to be solved technically. Another senior designer discussed their uncompensated
volunteer labor in furthering their company’s diversity and inclusion initiatives. And they
expressed frustration at having to repeatedly prompt team members to consider how product
changes might create harms for end users. This participant said, quote “every single…conversation
is like this. Where it’s ‘oh yeah I hadn’t thought of it that way’”, and like I have
been telling you.” End quote. The design fiction extends these accounts
by creating an interface to make this labor visible. The grid in the design fiction adapts
a visualization used by GitHub to track a person’s technical contributions to a project.
Applying that model of tracking to values advocacy work begins to raise questions about
the politics and implications of making values work visible in this way, which could be problematic
in its own right. This design helped me reflect on aspects of invisible, emotional, and gendered
labor in values and ethics advocacy. Across 4 memos, the paper goes into more depth
discussing how the work of values and ethics advocacy by UX professionals is not only technical,
but deeply social and affected by organizational power dynamics.
The paper provides several reflections on design fiction memoing, how they compare to
written memos, and some guidance on creating and evaluating them. Design fiction memos
can help researchers analyze and reflect on qualitative data in new ways, enable the exploration
of a complex and rich set of issues in a way that resists simple design solutions, and
provides a new way to circulate ethnographic accounts and stories.
Thank you to many colleagues, the reviewers, and the participants for sharing their stories.