Design Justice

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims explicitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!

An exploration of social movement media practices in an increasingly complex media ecology, through richly detailed cases of immigrant rights activism.For decades, social movements have vied for attention from the mainstream mass media—newspapers, radio, and television. Today, many argue that social media power social movements, from the Egyptian revolution to Occupy Wall Street. Yet, as Sasha Costanza-Chock reports, community organizers know that social media enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face organizing. The revolution will be tweeted, but tweets alone do not the revolution make. In Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Costanza-Chock traces a much broader social movement media ecology. Through a richly detailed account of daily media practices in the immigrant rights movement, the book argues that there is a new paradigm of social movement media making: transmedia organizing. Despite the current spotlight on digital media, Costanza-Chock finds, social movement media practices tend to be cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, even as they create media ranging from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television.Drawing on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects, Costanza-Chock presents case studies of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement over the last decade. Chapters focus on the historic mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful activists; efforts to widen access to digital media tools and skills for low-wage immigrant workers; paths to participation in DREAM activism; and the implications of professionalism for transmedia organizing. These cases show us how savvy transmedia organizers work to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform public consciousness forever

Design Justice and Design Pedagogies with Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock

Zoom Link: https://linnbenton.zoom.us/j/98939920915 In this 90-minute keynote address, Dr. Costanza-Chock will share reflections on critical pedagogies of design justice. We will explore questions such as: How might we teach and learn design justice? What would it mean for institutional structures to support a community-based pedagogy of technology design? What are the challenges in an age of the neoliberalization of the educational system? Dr. Costanza-Chock will challenge Oregon\u27s open ed community to build design systems where students analyze the role of design in our world, recommending methods and strategies that instructional designers and open education practitioners in Oregon can take up to design for justice. This presentation will include a series of questions and collaborative opportunities for participants to apply concepts and talk together, creating action steps for changing design systems in their own campus communities

Academic Accomplices: Practical Strategies for Research Justice

This workshop brings together folks currently or interested in becoming academic accomplices, or scholars committed to leveraging resources and power to support the justice work of their community collaborators. Academic accomplices are necessary for research justice-research that materially challenges inequity-and owe it to community partners to challenge underlying oppressive structure and practices as perpetuated through academic research. The goal of this workshop is to discuss concrete strategies for challenging oppression through research methodologies, physical or institutional resources, and/or pedagogy. This workshop will generate practical strategies for research justice for DIS and HCI scholars

Mobile Voices: Projecting the Voices of Immigrant Workers by Appropriating Mobile Phones for Popular Communication

Mobile Voices, also known as VozMob (www.vozmob.net), is a digital storytelling platform for first generation, low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to create and publish stories about their communities, directly from cell phones. The project is a partnership between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit that organizes low-income immigrants in Los Angeles. Founded in 1984, IDEPSCA's programs are focused on education, economic development, health access and reform, popular communication, and worker rights. Currently IDEPSCA runs six day laborer and household worker centers and two day laborer corners where workers look for jobs in a more humane and dignified way while learning about their rights and gaining valuable leadership skills. The Annenberg School for Communication (the research partner) and IDEPSCA (the community partner) came together around the shared goal of designing communication systems and processes that promote media justice and help those without computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere. This chapter is a reflection on popular communication, participatory design, andcommunity-based multimedia practice from the Mobile Voices project team. It was collaboratively written by 13 members of the project and includes a project overview and an exploration of themes including the pedagogy of popular communication, participatory technology design, and the dynamic

Against Reduction

Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world's most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves. Inspired by a widely read manifesto by Joi Ito that called for embracing the diversity and irreducibility of the world, these essays offer persuasive and compelling variations on resisting reduction. Among other things, the writers draw on Indigenous epistemology to argue for an extended “circle of relationships” that includes the nonhuman and robotic; cast “Snow White” as a tale of AI featuring a smart mirror; point out the cisnormativity of security protocol algorithms; map the interconnecting networks of so-called noncommunicable disease; and consider the limits of moral mathematics. Taken together, they show that we should push back against some of the reduction around us and do whatever is in our power to work toward broader solutions

“We come together as one…and hope for solidarity to live on”: On designing technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives

On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW), sex worker rights advocates and support services commemorate lives lost due to violence. In this paper we describe and reflect on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that supported the activities of IDEVASW over two years in North East England. Working alongside a charity that provides services to women who are sex workers or have experienced sexual exploitation, we co-organised the first activist march on the day. As researchers and service providers, we present detailed reflections on the use of digital technologies during the public activist march, a private service for commemoration, and the development of a semi-public archive to collect experiences of the day. We develop three implications for the design of digital technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives: as catalysts for reflection and opportunities to layer experience

Se ve, se siente: Transmedia mobilization in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement

This project examines transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, participatory workshops, and rich media archives, this analysis provides an in-depth view of the communication strategies, tools, and skills used by immigrant workers, students, and movement allies of many different backgrounds who live, struggle, and organize in streets, homes, workplaces, and community centers throughout the city. The research employs Communication for Social Change methods to help movement actors articulate their media and technology goals, analyze their most important obstacles, and develop a stronger praxis of digital media literacy. The goal of this project is to understand the conditions under which social movements successfully use networked communication to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness. The key findings of this analysis suggest that effective use is possible when the media opportunity structure provides openings, movement formations engage in transmedia mobilization, the movement develops a praxis of digital media literacy, and movement formations shift from top-down structures of communicative practice to horizontal, participatory structures that include their social base. The project contributes to social movement theory and practice as well as to the political economy of communication

Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. The article posits three key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures, and explores them through the lens of the Occupy movement: (1) What media platforms, tools and skills are used most widely by movement participants? (Practices); (2) What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (Expertise); and (3) In what ways does the movement media culture lean toward open or participatory, and in what ways toward closed or top-down? (Open/Closed). Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey, a database of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million Occupy-related tweets. The findings will be of interest to both scholars and movement participants