Exploring Social Justice, Design,and HCI

The aim of this one-day workshop is to share existing research, discuss common practices, and to develop new strategies and tools for designing for social justice in HCI. This workshop will bring together a set of HCI scholars, designers, and community members to discuss social justice perspectives on interaction design and technology. We will explore theoretical and methodological approaches in and around HCI that can help us generatively consider issues of power, privilege, and access in their complexity. We will discuss the challenges associated with taking a justice approach in HCI, looking toward existing practices we find both productive and problematic. This workshop will bridge current gaps in research and practice by developing concrete strategies for both designing and evaluating social change oriented work in HCI, where agendas are made clear and researchers are held accountable for the outcomes of their work by members of their field site and the research community

Using technologies to commemorate International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers in the North East of England

This article explores the use of digital technologies at the commemoration of International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers in the North East of England in 2016 and 2017. Learning from sex work research and Human-Computer Interaction literatures, this feminist exploration of the day provides opportunities for more nuanced and contextualised discussions of digital technologies that are used with, and for sex workers and sex work support services. In the paper, I provide an overview of how this day is commemorated internationally before providing a detailed overview of a hyper-localised day organised by Changing Lives, a charity supporting sex workers, people who have experienced sexual exploitation, and those engaged in survival sex. I focus on the ways in which they use digital technologies throughout an activist march and a reflexive commemoration event to better understand the ways in which novel digital technologies could be designed and implemented for these kinds of commemorations in the future

Technologies for Social Justice: Lessons from Sex Workers on the Front Lines

This paper provides analysis and insight from a collaborative process with a Canadian sex worker rights organization called Stella, l'amie de Maimie, where we reflect on the use of and potential for digital technologies in service delivery. We analyze the Bad Client and Aggressor List - a reporting tool co-produced by sex workers in the community and Stella staff to reduce violence against sex workers. We analyze its current and potential future formats as an artefact for communication, in a context of sex work criminalization and the exclusion of sex workers from traditional routes for reporting violence and accessing governmental systems for justice. This paper addresses a novel aspect of HCI research that relates to digital technologies and social justice. Reflecting on the Bad Client and Aggressor List, we discuss how technologies can interact with justice-oriented service delivery and develop three implications for design

ICT for Sustainable Last-Mile Logistics: Data, People and Parcels

In this paper we present a vision of how ICT can be leveraged to help combat the impact on pollution, congestion and carbon emissions contributed by the parcel delivery sector. This is timely given annual growth in parcel deliveries, especially same-day deliveries, and the need to inform initiatives to clean up our cities such as the sales ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK by 2040. Our insights are informed by research on parcel logistics in Central London, leveraging a data set of parcel manifests spanning 6 months. To understand the impact of growing e-commerce trends on parcel deliveries we provide a mixed methods case study leveraging data-driven analysis and qualitative fieldwork to demonstrate how ICT can uncover the impact of parcel deliveries on delivery drivers and their delivery rounds during seasonal deliveries (or “the silly season”). We finish by discussing key opportunities for intervention and further research in ICT4S and co-created Smart Cities, connecting our findings with existing research and data as a call to the ICT4S community to help tackle the growth in carbon emissions, pollution and congestion linked to parcel deliveries

Transforming Last-Mile Logistics: Opportunities for more Sustainable Deliveries

Road congestion, air pollution and sustainability are increasingly important in major cities. We look to understand how last-mile deliveries in the parcel sector are impacting our roads. Using formative field work and quantitative analysis of consignment manifests and location data, we identify how the effectiveness of life-style couriers is contributing to both environmental and non-environmental externalities. This paper presents an analysis of delivery performances and practices in last-mile logistics in central London, quantifying the impacts differing levels of experience have on overall round efficiency. We identify eleven key opportunities for technological support for last-mile parcel deliveries that could contribute to both driver eectiveness and sustainability. We finish by examining how HCI can lead to improved environmental and social justice by re-considering and realizing future collaborative visions in last-mile logistics

Designing for the Infrastructure of the Supply Chain of Malay Handwoven Songket in Terengganu

The growing HCI interest in developing contexts and cultural craft practices is ripe to focus on their under-explored homegrown sociotechnical infrastructures. This paper explores the creative infrastructural actions embedded within the practices of songket's supply chain in Terengganu, Malaysia. We report on contextual interviews with 92 participants including preparation workers, weavers, designers, merchants, and customers. Findings indicate that increased creative infrastructural actions are reflected in these actors' resourcefulness for mobilizing information, materials, and equipment, and for making creative artifacts through new technologies weaved within traditional practices. We propose two novel approaches to design in this craft-based infrastructure. First, we explore designing for the social layer of infrastructure and its mutually advantageous exploitative relationships rooted in culture and traditions. Second, we suggest designing for roaming value-creation artifacts, which blend physical and digital materializations of songket textile design. Developed through a collaborative and asynchronous process, we argue that these artifacts represent less-explored vehicles for value co-creation, and that sociotechnical infrastructures as emerging sites of innovation could benefit from HCI research

ICT under constraint: exposing tensions in collaboratively prioritising ICT innovation for climate targets

The international treaty known as the Paris Agreement requires global greenhouse gas emissions to decrease at a pace that will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Given the pressure on all sectors to reduce their emissions to meet this target, the ICT sector must begin to explore how to innovate under constraint for the first time. This could mean facing the unprecedented dilemma of having to choose between innovations, in which case the community will need to develop processes for making collective decisions regarding which innovations are most deserving of their carbon costs. In this paper, we expose tensions in collaboratively prioritising ICT innovation under constraints, and discuss the considerations and approaches the ICT sector may require to make such decisions effectively across the sector. This opens up a new area of research where we envision HCI expertise can inform and resolve such tensions for values-based and target-led ICT innovation towards a sustainable future

Sculpting reality from our dreams: Prefigurative design for civic engagement

At their core, organizing and activist work are about envisioning and working towards an alternative, more just political future. Various digital tools are used to support activist work, however these tools engage with values that are at odds with activist practices: where many activists do work in the service of social justice and equity, the digital tools they use are often corporate made, and thus support the status quo, i.e. profit generation, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, oppression. The ideals underlying activists’ equitable visions—of a more accessible and just future—drive their practices. This intentional alignment falls under the purview of prefigurative politics, where political work “express[es] the political ‘ends’ of their actions through their ‘means.’” [53] If activists envision a more democratic future, they adopt more equitable practices in the present in anticipation of building a more equitable future. This dissertation explores the role of digital tools to contribute to—to prefigure—alternative, more radical political values. My work uses design research and anarchist literature to explore the opportunities that ICTs offer in support of radically progressive political organizing. This work offers prefigurative design as an approach for designers and practitioners who work with communities in service of progressive political change. Prefigurative design is an orientation within HCI design and research that encourages critical reflection of research and design practices to better align design artifacts and processes with anarchist goals of anti-oppression and collective liberation, ultimately building counter-structures to replace existing institutions complicit in violence and oppression.Ph.D