🗣 How Do We Make Our Digital Public Spaces Welcoming to All?
Exploring the principles of Design Justice.
Editor’s Note
“Technologies embody social relations (power).” -Sasha Costanza-Chock
As we kicked off the New_ Public Festival last month, Jamin Warren, our host, recognized that he was situated on the indigenous land of the Chumash and Gabrieleño peoples. We asked participants to type their pronouns in their Zoom names, used large closed captioning text to transcribe the verbal discussion, had American Sign Language interpreters, and panelists introduced themselves using personal descriptors for the blind and low vision community.
As a relative newcomer to New_ Public, I was moved by the thoughtful display of empathy. Later in breakout rooms, I overheard feedback from festival participants that such a pronounced attempt at inclusion and welcoming felt a bit overwhelming. Was it possible that in our welcoming, we were also being unwelcoming? It is very possible. I thanked the participants for their vulnerability and courage to speak out and go against the grain. “Welcome” is a building block in our Signals research. This is our work: to creatively design inclusive spaces, and to be humble enough to iterate when these attempts don’t land.
As an organization, we’ve found inspiration from the principles of design justice as collectively written by the Design Justice Network (if you’re not familiar with their work, we encourage you to become a member here). Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the many challenges marginalized communities face.
In scholar/designer Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, they write that design justice calls for designers’ ongoing attention to the ways differences shape design. A core concept of design theory is affordance. For example, a chair affords sitting and its designer’s biases and perceptions shape how it does that: the size and shape of the sitter, the accessibility needed to use it from standing on two feet, what room the chair will be used for, etc. The theory of affordances points out the close relationship between perception and action. This design standpoint — the culture, experience, and learning of the designer — plays a role in determining the affordance perceptibility of the object.
Costanza-Chock writes, “An object’s affordances are never equally perceptible to all, and never equally available to all; a given affordance is always more perceptible, more available, or both, to some kinds of people.” Dominant values and norms not only play a role in product design but are also encoded into the design of tech and social platforms like assumptions about names (usually ethnic), pronouns, race, and gender (usually binary).
In Design Justice Network’s fifth zine, “How to make a local Design Justice node”, the collective shared a community lesson. The Brooklyn Public Library hosted an event titled “Brownsville DiscoTech: An Intergenerational Technology Skillshare.” The organization was intentional about the long name to signify who could belong to and be accepted by the community. Elders saw “intergenerational” and knew that they would be welcomed and the location of the event pointed to a historically Black community. In six purposeful words, the library welcomed a greater swath of people.
We all can do our part in being welcoming and designing events, meetings, products, or platforms with more intentionality, respect, and responsibility to marginalized groups.
In their writing, Costanza-Chock reminds us that the history of design and disability activism provides a cornerstone for design justice. The disability justice movement has called for eradicating the notion of designing for “dysfunctional” bodies and has moved toward a social-relational model that builds on analysis of how disability is constructed by culture, institutions, and the built environment. Community accountability and design processes have been institutionalized and upheld like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That history actually teaches us that “a social movement can impact design policy, processes, and practices in long-lasting ways.
Why we practiced these acknowledgments at the New_ Public Festival:
In some parts of the world, it is common place and policy to open events and gatherings by acknowledging the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of that land. A grassroots action network created a resource for Natives and non-Natives alike called “Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgment".
By sharing our own pronouns routinely, we can encourage others to do the same and demonstrate that we understand the importance of sharing pronouns. Using a person’s correct pronouns is an important way of affirming their identity and is a fundamental step in being an ally. MyPronouns.org wrote an important guide to using more inclusive language.
Through automatic speech recognition (ASR), Zoom closed captioning made the panel discussions more accessible to a larger audience, even if it was a bit delayed at times.
Signed into law in 2010, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) establishes new protections to ensure that people with disabilities are not left behind as consumers migrate to the next generation of Internet-based and digital communication technologies. Read about it here.
Spoken or written image descriptions provide a textual description of images presented in digital documents. These descriptions support the inclusion of blind, low vision, and low-tech users. The American Anthropological Association developed useful guidelines for creating image descriptions.
-Marina Garcia-Vasquez
Design Justice Network Principles
We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.* (This principle was inspired by and adapted from Allied Media.)
We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.
Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
The Design Justice Network is an international community of people and organizations who are committed to rethinking design processes so that they center people who are too often marginalized by design. If you are interested in reading more about the movement, the organization collectively authors zines and design guidelines on a regular basis. If you are interested in becoming a member of the community or signing on to the principals, learn more here.
What’s Clicking
🌐 Online
A teen with cerebral palsy collaborated with Nike in the design of an adaptive shoe. (Jaipreet Virdi on Twitter)
Individual thinking is a myth, write Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach in their latest book. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. (NYT Book Review)
Adam Curtis explains why people in the nineteenth century did not think and feel like we do today. (The New Yorker)
Time has never been experienced one way, but rather differently by different people, in relation to their power, status, and mental and physical health and safety. (Vanessa Mason and The Future of Belonging)
Indonesian activist Dhyta Caturani is working to overcome gender discrimination on tech platforms. (Rest of World)
🏙 Offline: Design from Cities
The Covid biking boom in American cities illuminates the need for more bicycle infrastructure. Read how Cambridge and DC have handled it. (CityLab)
MoMA presents 10 newly commissioned works by architects, designers, and artists that explore how histories can be made visible and equity can be built in Architecture and Blackness in America. (MoMA)
Deem Forum published three Zoom conversations on designing for dignity in architecture, food justice, and community-centric living. (Deem Journal)
Using our senses in the physical world to develop future digital spaces,
The New_ Public team
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.