Maja van der Velden

Design for a common world: On ethical agency and cognitive justice

The paper discusses two answers to the question, How to address the harmful effects of technology? The first response proposes a complete separation of science from culture, religion, and ethics. The second response finds harm in the logic and method of science itself. The paper deploys a feminist technoscience approach to overcome these accounts of neutral or deterministic technological agency. In this technoscience perspective, agency is not an attribute of autonomous human users alone but enacted and performed in socio-material configurations of people and technology and their ‘intra-actions’. This understanding of agency is proposed as an alternative that opens up for the reconfiguration of design and use for more ethical effects, such as the cultivation of cognitive justice, the equal treatment and representation of different ways of knowing the world. The implication of this approach is that design becomes an adaptive and ongoing intra-active process in which more desirable configurations of people and technology become possible.

Programming for cognitive justice

This paper contrasts two approaches to knowledge sharing for socio-economic development to examine how assumptions about knowledge are reflected in computer-based information systems. The paper argues that socio-technical systems for global knowledge sharing posses a bias resulting from choices about technology and from assumptions about knowledge, and that this bias may adversely affect the diversity of knowledge. To overcome this bias, the concept of cognitive justice is proposed and, on this basis, a framework suggested to guide the design of information systems based on a principle of the equal validity of all knowledges.

Between Need and Desire Exploring Strategies for Gendering Design

Script analysis is often used in research that focuses on gender and technology design. It is applied as a method to describe problematic inscriptions of gender in technology and as a tool for advancing more acceptable inscriptions of gender in technology. These analyses are based on the assumption that we can design technologies that do justice to gender. One critique on script analysis is that it does not engage with the emergent effects of design. The authors explore this critique with the help of two vignettes taken from their design research. In this article they ask: How to design for gender if gender and design are emergent? The authors present two design strategies, degendering design and undesigning design and propose a new approach to doing justice to gender in design. This perspective foregrounds ethics in the design process, in particular the accountability of technology designers.

Decentering Design: Wikipedia and Indigenous Knowledge

This article is a reflection on the case of Wikipedia, the largest online reference site with 23 million articles, with 365 million readers, and without a page called Indigenous knowledge. A Postcolonial Computing lens, extended with the notion of decentering, is used to find out what happened with Indigenous knowledge in Wikipedia. Wikipedias ordering technologies, such as policies and templates, play a central role in producing knowledge. Two designs, developed with and for Indigenous communities, are introduced to explore if another Wikipedias design is possible.This article is a reflection on the case of Wikipedia, the largest online reference site with 23 million articles, with 365 million readers, and without a page called Indigenous knowledge. A Postcolonial Computing lens, extended with the notion of decentering, is used to find out what happened with Indigenous knowledge in Wikipedia. Wikipedias ordering technologies, such as policies and templates, play a central role in producing knowledge. Two designs, developed with and for Indigenous communities, are introduced to explore if another Wikipedias design is possible.

The Digital Life of Vulnerable Users: Designing with Children, Patients, and Elderly

Vulnerability is about being at risk and it is often understood as the effect of limited physical or cognitive capabilities, such as age, frailty or illness. Vulnerable people are frequently excluded from the design of technologies that could in fact support them in tackling these risks. This paper explores designing with three vulnerable groups: children with special needs, chronically ill teenage patients, and isolated, or afraid of being so in the near future, elderly adults. We choose three distinct groups in order to show the breadth and variations in the ways in which people may be vulnerable. We looked at their digital lives and possible new risks and dependencies created by the use of digital technologies. Designing with vulnerable people is practically, methodologically, and ethically challenging. We show how methodological and reflexive sensibilities help to address these challenges and keep the design process on track.

Participatory DesignDesign participatory and Design for Values

Participatory Design (PD) is a design methodology in which the future users of a design participate as co-designers in the design process. It is a value-centered design approach because of its commitment to the democratic and collective shaping of a better future. This chapter builds forth on the Scandinavian Participatory Design tradition. We discuss why the design process is as important as the final result, the product, or service. The creative application of Participatory Design methods facilitates a design process in which values emerge and become inscribed in a prototype. We present PD’s guiding principles: equalizing power relations, democratic practices, situation-based action, mutual learning, tools and techniques, and alternative visions about technology. In addition, we discuss some value practices and design methods informed by our PD projects in health care and the public sector. We maintain that Participatory Design increases the chance that the final result of a design process represents the values of the future users.

Designing Interactive Technologies with Teenagers in a Hospital Setting

This chapter describes a design process with teenagers with chronic health challenges. The design activities were related to two main themes, the transition from paediatrics to adult healthcare and patient-oriented social networking, and were implemented with a group of young patients who were members of the Youth Council, an advisory body to the hospital. We describe two design strategies, Design Stations and Continuous Participation Platform. Design Stations facilitate a design process that uses the time with the teens effectively and caters also to the teens’ creativity and attention span. The Continuous Participation Platform contributes to maintaining consistency and continuity between the Design Station meetings. The process consisted of four design workshops, which took place in a hospital, and online activities in between these workshops. Nine small research projects were implemented, using a range of diverse participatory methods and tools. In the chapter we analyse and discuss the results using the SHARM framework, our Participatory Design methodology for designing with and for teenagers with chronic health challenges. SHARM focuses on situation-based action, having a say, adaptability, respect, and mutual learning. We found that our participants switch between their identity as a patient and as a teenager. Building and strengthening a third identity, namely that of a co-designer, may further improve the design efforts when designing with this particular group of participants.

Culture, Technology, Communication. Common World, Different Futures

This volume constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 13.8 International Conference on Culture, Technology, and Communication, CaTaC 2016, held in London, UK, in June 2016. The 9 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers explore the intersections between culture, technology, and communication, applying different theoretical and methodological perspectives, genres, and styles. They deal with cultural attitudes towards technology and communication, interaction design, and international development.

Design as Regulation

Mobile phones have become one of the most unsustainable consumer goods. Social and environmental risks are found throughout the whole lifecycle of mobile phones. This chapter introduces the notion of lifecycle thinking to take sustainability beyond the product towards the larger product-system. Design can play a central role creating sustainable product lifecycles, but is constraint by other modes of regulation, such as law, social norms, and market. This paper explores the opportunities and limitations of design as regulation. The relational concepts of script and affordance help to provide a non-deterministic account of design as regulation. The particular case of the Fairphone 2, a smartphone designed with social and environmental values, will be discussed to investigate design as regulation. The notions of regulatory ecology and regulatory patching are introduced as tools to explore opportunities for constructing a more desirable regulatory regime.