Hi, everyone. I'm Kirsten Bray from Georgia Tech.
Over the summer the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab conducted a total of 27 interviews with community designers.
We were evaluating a toolkit for afrofuturist design speculation.
These interviews support the importance of design tools that prompt conversations on race and design
and helped us consider challenges of critical future speculation in Black and brown communities in the US.
The HCI community has grappled with issues of representation in design and research, both in the field and of populations included in HCI research.
Issues of racial equity and representation are of heightened importance within the United States,
where race or class can influence the power dynamics in a research process.
Researchers like Walsh have noted that current methods do not always accommodate
for ways that racialized power imbalances can limit who can participate and whose voices are heard.
Speculative design uses future fictional narratives to encourage communities to consider futures they would like to see.
It offers an opportunity to encourage creative and democratic approaches to sustained change,
but the method has been critiqued as lacking in engagements with race or class.
Engagements with race are particularly important in design methods that are intended to incorporate non-designers and marginalized groups in the design process.
As such, researchers such as Baumen et and Winchester have looked into Afrofuturism, asserting its imaginative and empathic potential when coupled with design.
Afrofuturism is a genre that blends history, cultures, social issues and Black aesthetic,
and begins with the assumption that speculation will incorporate Black experiences.
The genre offers an opportunity to foreground conversations on race, and its role in solution building,
centering marginalized communities as key collaborators in the design process.
Prior community-led experiments have contributed to this work,
and this research as to a body of existing work, where others have used their visions for futures for the historically oppressed,
to fuel innovative speculation and equitable design.
Our work thus aimed to create an openly accessible resource for designers and non-designers in these communities
that leveraged the potential of speculative design framed with an Afrofuturist lens.
We posed the following research questions:
In what ways could an Afrofuturism based speculative design toolkit support community design practitioners?
And how might it be used to promote the inclusion of historically excluded groups in design?
In order to develop this concept into a resource for community design practitioners,
we began the process of expanding and preparing the toolkit, which would then be evaluated by the community design practitioners.
Our prior work on this toolkit explored the use of Afrofuturism as a lens for creating design probes.
The initial toolkit here was developed as a five deck set of cards to facilitate speculative design exercises.
Our research thus began with a series of brainstorming sessions with two community design practitioners.
They helped us map our intentions and refine the content of the toolkit.
The final toolkit evaluated in this research included a workbook and five card decks,
Forecasting, Topics, Liberation, Methods, and Tools.
The Forecasting cards at a time for technology speculation,
the Topics deck included culturally relevant and community related topics.
The Liberation deck asks questions about how communities to find their own liberation and bring their experiences into the design process.
The Methods deck has simple ideation exercises, sharing methods that encourage collaborative design
The Tools deck included technical and non-technical design solutions that served as prompts
for thinking about what tools might help bring about desired futures,
and blank cards could also be used to supplement the existing content with community input.
The workbook describes the uses for these cards, offering prompts to complete while using them, as well as a space to write out or sketch ideas
We recruited community design practitioners for a series of semi-structured virtual interviews,
Reaching out through emails and snowball sampling,
we recruited a diverse sample of 27 participants who worked across various sectors of design.
Participants were sent digital pages of the cards and an ideation workbook.
They were also given a pre-interview survey to gather demographic data
before participating in virtual one hour interviews, in which we asked for their impressions of the toolkit,
their impressions of its cultural relevance, and their thoughts on how the toolkit might be received by the communities they worked in.
The use of Afrofuturism in the toolkit was positively received,
and interviewees commented on its capacity to encourage discussions on race, and the opportunity to center tenets like joy in design.
The majority of interviewees felt they could use the toolkit and communities they worked in,
and we were able to identify distinct use cases for individual and group use.
For instance, for those in corporate design,
the toolkit was described as something designers might use to allow them to rethink design and whether it incorporates historically marginalized people.
Community-oriented, nonprofit, and grassroots organizations were also mentioned as places where the toolkit could be used.
Interviewees like Participant 4 noted the potential of the toolkit to facilitate necessary conversations and community design, particularly at the start of projects.
These conversations could help build and strengthen community ties
by opening up discussions of how relationships to racial identity intersect with their desires for the future.
They also reframe design by explicitly incorporating topics like black joy, cultural bias or environmental racism.
Our interviews also highlighted the potential of Afrofuturism as a tool for bridging identity gaps
and we realized that an Afrofuturist lens could be used to provide a way to frame conversations on race with people who don't share this identity.
We also identify important considerations for improving our toolkit.
Since the toolkit was intended to be used as a design probe, we wanted to leave instructions for using the cards more open ended,
but interviewees let us know that stating the goals of the cards would allow those using it to see when and why they might benefit from codesign processes,
something that would be beneficial for those being introduced to design methods for the first time.
We also received varied feedback on its incorporation of culture.
Some wondered whether the toolkit should delve deeper into its inclusion of race,
while others questioned if it could be used outside of black and brown communities because of the cultural specificity.
Designers employing an Afrofuturist lens might consider how communities work to identify shared values that support black and brown futures,
while still making space to encourage open cross cultural dialogue.
It is also important for designers to be aware that speculative design in marginalized communities fosters hope that should not be taken lightly.
Speculation without commitment to action can damage the trust that communities extend to researchers or designers when working with them,
and that trivializes the process.
Participant 8 commented on this saying,
"I will say that one of the challenges too, especially for me in this context of the organization,
and what I've been pushing for within my organization, is that nonprofits make a lot of false promises."
Fortunately, by making toolkits like this one accessible to community design practitioners,
we can support the work of the people invested in solution building in their communities, and those that know them best.
Toolkits like this one have the potential to encourage community led design and collaborative identification of community goals and values
that are negotiated their collective conversation and adaptation.
Employing an Afrofuturist lens additionally opens an avenue for engagement in Black communities
that approaches ideation with tenants of joy, liberation and community building.
Our work demonstrates the value of encouraging imagination and community collaboration,
while still maintaining a grounding in the current realities of marginalized groups, and the efforts that will be necessary to achieve such visions.
We encourage you to take a look at our paper to read more about our research and findings.
Thank you