Earlier this year, the Biden/Harris Cabinet became the most race, age and gender-diverse administration in American history. Many appointments were historic “firsts:” Janet Yellen, the first woman to be Treasury Secretary, Deb Haaland, the first Native American to be Secretary of the Interior, Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Hispanic to be secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and Lloyd Austin the first Black person to be Defense Secretary.
As an American value, pluralism — an ethic for living together in a diverse society: not mere tolerance or relativism, but a real encounter of commitments — has historically been more of an aspiration than a reality. Our dollar bills say “E Pluribus Unum,” and our mythology talks about “melting pots,” but in practice, white men and Christianity have been at the center of American identity and power.
Many of us see, in the Biden appointments, the emergence of a multi-racial America. But creating digital spaces that truly embrace pluralism, is not easy. Communication among a homogenous group is easier at first than communication among a group with more diversity, even if the latter is likely to produce more creative, sustainable, and equitable ideas in the long run. Groups of similar people have shared frames of reference; groups of people who come from different backgrounds have to build those shared frames, and that takes trust and work.
In this newsletter, we asked four brilliant practitioners — john a. powell from the Othering and Belonging Institute, Carrie Joy Grimes from WorkMoney, Jose Antonio Vargas from Define American, and Jana Thompson from the Design Justice Network — to reflect on what they’ve learned in designing for pluralism in their organizations and platforms, and how that can create more inclusive and human-centered spaces. Their full thoughts are below, but four themes came to the surface:
Beware one-size-fits-all. When one perspective dominates in creating something that is supposed to be for everyone, it often doesn’t serve everyone.
Participatory design practices offer a way to engage a broader group of potential users in conversation.
Achieving massive scale is often at odds with attempting to offer people the dignity and agency they need and deserve to engage with each other across difference.
The best of what human-centered design can do is to allow genuine connections across differences, uniting around universal needs.
And we’d love to hear from all of you: What have you learned about designing for pluralism and multiplicity? Please drop us a line at hello@newpublic.org or with the comment button below and we’ll share some of your thoughts in a future newsletter.
VOICES
Now, over to Carrie, Jose, Jana and john, and getting to know their organizations’ values:
Carrie Joy Grimes, Co-founder
WorkMoney.org
Helps Americans figure navigate economic catastrophe.
“At WorkMoney, our role is to rally Americans together around a unifying vision: that we should be able to afford to live good lives. We often organize members from different communities toward a common goal, like passing the recent stimulus package. To do that, we reached out to our members to collect tens of thousands of comments and bring dozens of people to meetings with nine different Senate offices. Given their ZIP codes, and the wide range of our members' political positions from Trump supporting Republicans to Biden supporting Democrats, there’s low likelihood these members ever would have met. But through sharing their personal stories and having real, empathetic conversations — all facilitated by tech, not in-person — they bonded and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in calling on their Senators to vote for the American Rescue Plan. For us, that’s the best of what human-centered design can do — allow genuine connections across differences, uniting around universal needs.
Frankly, it’s not what we mostly see in the segregated gardens of social media. So we spark direct, tech-facilitated conversations with our members. And at a certain point, we take the conversation offline. We call them. We put them in “rooms” (Zooms) with each other. We do online town halls. We “visit” Senate offices together online.
Tech that centers human stories, experiences, and empathy makes our work possible. Tech that doesn't do that exacerbates our problem.”
Jose Antonio Vargas, Founder
Define American
Rewriting immigrant narratives from a place of empowerment and authenticity for mainstream consumption on social media.
“At Define American, we believe that the stories we tell directly speak to our values as a society, how we live our lives, and, ultimately, how we treat one another. Our work is uniquely focused on narrative and advocacy that helps cultivate accurate immigrant representation in the media — inclusive of all of the ways in which we absorb information be it news, narrative storytelling, and the other varied ways in which we are nourished and entertained by stories. The vision and transformational power of a pluralist world is a crucial story we need to continue to amplify in each and every element of our work, and which informs every part of our strategic focus. Globalization is a well-understood phenomenon but its ramifications and benefits are not universal — we face the dual challenges of scalability and ensuring that human rights and dignity are intrinsic in their execution.
New technology gives us the first real opportunity in history for cooperation and communication in facing global threats as a community. In order to achieve that mutual respect and cooperation, we must invest in pluralistic values — both in the technology we co-create, and the stories that emerge from those vessels of progress.”
Jana Thompson, Data Scientist and UX Researcher
Design Justice Network
A community of people and organizations committed to rethinking design processes to center people often marginalized by design.
“Due to cost constraints, design has often gone for a one-size fits all solution. This has often had some benefits such as the cases of designing for accessibility that have had widespread impact. Any parent or babysitter who has pushed a stroller can appreciate a ramp for crossing streets or an elevator for the subway. I doubt there are many people left on the planet who haven’t sent at least one SMS, a technology invented by Finnish designers for the Deaf community to communicate.
Despite these successes of design, universalist notions of equality do not translate to equity or even utility. Many things in a person’s life are dependent upon the context of their situations, some of which are immutable, such as race, and others which are mutable, such as age or marital status. Considerations of well-being, such as mental health, financial security, and even an individual’s life and safety can depend on the design of the tools they use.
Consider the proliferation of women’s health apps in the last five years. Many of these apps focus on menstrual cycles. While this is a useful and necessary application for many cis-gendered women throughout a good portion of their adult lives, this doesn’t capture the reality of many women’s lives at all or in all stages like transgendered women or menopausal cis-gendered women. Designing for one gender identity alone should encompass a pluralist approach to ensure the typically acknowledged good of physical health.
Design research and participatory methods in design research point to the potential to examine the broad diversity of perspectives and communities that exist within every society. Meeting challenges of continuing poverty and inequity globally will require finding solutions that are cooperative, not disruptive. Learning to listen to others and the goal of empathy as enshrined within design approaches can help construct frameworks and paradigms that take into account the good of all. Most significantly, by listening to all voices rather than the prevailing paradigm of cost being economic cost and the demand for ceaseless growth can contribute to a future where technology and post-digital solutions can thrive both locally and globally.”
john a. powell, Director
Othering & Belonging Institute
Supports research to generate policy changes that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and socioeconomics.
“The challenge we need to tackle in order to “design for pluralism” is right here in the question. To think about design’s place in this question we first have to ask, what is a human-centered outcome? To design for humans we have to have an idea of what a human is: what needs, abilities, desires, problems, and experience they have. To do this it is natural to start from what we know: our own experiences. But if most people designing are disproportionately white and male, then that experience and its attendant biases are disproportionately represented in the products created. The design amplifies who we are rather than being a neutral tool for our use. We see stark examples of this in situations as focused as risk assessment tools showing bias against Black prisoners and credit scoring algorithms that disproportionately identify Black people as risks, and diffuse as the racial ordering achieved and sustained through the construction of, and displacement from, spaces both digital and physical.
Most of us would take offense if it was suggested that only Americans count as humans, or only white people or only men or only able-bodied people count as humans. But when one perspective dominates in creating something that is supposed to be for everyone, diverse needs, abilities, desires, and experiences are not really being taken into account. Technological advances have the potential for increasing our togetherness, but that potential has not manifested. Part of why it hasn’t is because design and technology have been approached as a practice in developing neutral techniques for human use. To expand who is designed for, we must expand who is doing the designing.
Pluralism — the fact of our living together — highlights both the promise and challenge of our modern existence, amplified by technology: we are already increasingly connected, we ‘live together.’ But can we come together, and create together, such that we will truly belong to each other? ‘Human’ alone is too abstract. Who would you draw if someone requested you draft a picture of a human? Those of us who largely inhabit a western world that centers ‘able’ bodies would likely not draw a disabled Maasai girl. It is not because we are bad, it is because our ‘we’ is too small. To design for pluralism, for humans, we must forever enlarge the ‘we’ in ‘them’ and ‘us.’”
An Appreciation of Many Perspectives
The Pluralism Project at Harvard published a whole project dedicated to Jainism’s anekantavada or recognizing the good qualities of many different points of view. Translated literally, it means “no-one-perspective-ism”; the multiplicity and relativity of views. In the classical Indian world Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus fiercely debated the nature of reality. The arguments espoused by the various participants in a debate all held some validity. Because the Jain position was able to overcome the apparent inconsistencies between the other views, however, it came closer to fully grasping the one underlying truth, satya.
Contemporary Jains reject the absolutist “either/or” that characterizes much of traditional Western logic, taking instead the relativist stance that for every question there are many “right” answers that reflect from different angles and in varying degrees the one truth.
At New_ Public we like this learning as a prompt to reconsider, How might we use the different angles of our truths to make a more truthful platform, one that is guided by pluralism? Read more about anekantavada here.
Again, we want to hear from you. What is technology’s responsibility in implementing pluralism? Do tech companies have a duty to implement the tenets of pluralism on their platforms and how?
Thinking of the “we” and the many “yous”,
The New_ Public team
Illustrations by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.