Provocation #4: The pluralism parabola and critique-centred design
Responses to global public health crises, environmental destruction, growing inequality, and a resurgent, exclusionary politics of hate require global-level discussions.
Given their planetary adoption, we might imagine that social media companies such as Meta could provide platforms for sustaining these discussions. A handful of these commercial companies enjoy a previously inconceivable power to determine who can speak and who is heard.
Yet, dominant digital platforms do not afford the thoughtful and inclusive spaces for collective exchange that we need. One reason for this is their design process, usually driven by the pursuit of profit rather than the public good, of attention rather than pluralism.
As we discussed earlier, in worlds made up of diverse ways of thinking and doing, pluralism should not only tolerate but also embrace ambiguity and difference; should consider individual and collective voice; and should protect the right to speak and to be silent, as well as opportunities to be heard. Pluralism is not just about individuals and groups, but also about the infrastructures that enable digitally-mediated publics.
However, as we unpack below, infinitely plural digital spaces are dangerous utopias. They are distracting dreams for places that can never exist.
So, aiming to build digital platforms that are always becoming as plural as possible, we propose the idea of critique-centred design.
The Pluralism Parabola
An intuitive way of pursuing pluralism would be to design digital spaces to be as open to people and forms of expression as possible.
Yet, in our work building digital platforms at CGHR, we have come to appreciate how, in pursuing pluralism in practice, designers encounter a pluralism paradox that takes the shape of a parabola.
An absolute commitment to pluralism would involve designing unbounded spaces, namely a world of infinite possibilities of communication, yet the risk of such utopianism is that it reduces coherence, confounds tangible means of relating, and weakens capacities for generating shared and new meanings.
Designing for infinite pluralism can, paradoxically, design it out.
In other words, there is a turning point on the parabola of pluralism. Too much structure stifles pluralism, and too little obliterates common ground, while, at the parabola’s turning point, boundedness in design actually produces as much pluralism as is possible.
We encountered this parabola in one project grown out of CGHR, Katikati, conceived to create a communications platform for organisations to converse one-to-one and open-endedly with counterparts at scale. Rejecting one-way bulk-messaging, two-way communications that use pre-decided closed-choice extraction formats, and dehumanised chatbots, Katikati rather sought to equip organisations to better engage with publics, to traverse uncertain conversational directions, and allow interlocutors to speak on their own terms.
However, as we moved forward with the project, working with social change partners in Kenya, Ghana, Somalia, Malawi and the UK, we saw the need to build a degree of structure into our socio-technical solution so these organisations could both sustain meaningful exchanges over time. Sufficient ‘boundedness’ had to be designed into the platform for free-flowing discussion to be mutually valuable and generative of new possibilities.
Drawing on reflexive critique with partners, the team behind Katikati designed various solutions, including the concept of semi-structured ‘turnlines’ to support conversational journeys. In contrast to automated surveys, turnlines allow analyst interlocutors to interpret and label a message, which then either unlocks the next step in a planned conversational journey or allows them to follow counterpart-led detours and exchanges before returning to the original plan.
Likewise, in the early days of co-designing the End Everyday Racism project, powered by The Whistle, we debated the mismatch between the free text data we wanted to collect, allowing witnesses of everyday racism to communicate testimonies in their own words, and the quantitative data we knew was ‘seductive’, in Sally Engle Merry’s words, to audiences accustomed to objectivity.
Alongside our free text boxes, then, we included multiple choice options in the testimony form, in which witnesses could choose, for example, from a list of emotions or embodied experiences they felt as a result of everyday racism. Following extensive discussions with anti-racism Cambridge community groups, we agreed to bound the pluralism of the project according to an epistemology that would ‘make sense’ to accountability institutions, and thus make the testimonies audible to them.
These examples demonstrate how we grappled with the problem that, in designing for pluralism, the ‘all’ approach can lead to ‘nothing’. But how do we design a design process that lets us balance at the turning point of the pluralism parabola? We are convinced that the design process itself should be pragmatically oriented around the principle of pluralism.
What we call critique-centred design keeps the design structure open for reflection and transformation from all participants and contributors..
Critique-Centred Design
Designing for pluralism requires pluralism in design — to make the very process of designing as pluralist as possible. To achieve this, communication platforms need to allow all participants to challenge and contest design, whether thinking about the pluralism parabola or any other norm driving the platform.
In other words, communication platforms need to be designed to embrace critique.
Here we move decisively up (or beyond) the ‘ladder of participation’ from the passive engagement of user-centred design towards what we are calling critique-centred design.
We are inspired by academics and practitioners who understand design as happening through collective worlds rather than individual genius. These include Escobar, who focuses on ‘ontological design’; Costanza-Chock, who writes about ‘design justice’ and community-controlled design; and Dunne and Raby, who advocate for ‘speculative design’. We also build on the idea of critical design, where the design product itself provokes reflection and imagination, but go beyond it to argue for a design process that centres on critique — critique not only of the surrounding worlds, but also of the design itself.
In developing our idea of critique-centred design, we also draw on scholarship about the nature of critique. By critique, we mean the capacity to interpret or reflect on a given design in a way that opens up the opportunity for imagining and making something completely different.
As Judith Butler explains, critique is not just judgement, and it is not just relational — a judgement of something in relation to a norm.
Critique is a practice of reimagining, not just of reimagining the something in relation to the world, but of reimagining the world as well. We can look to the practices of Black feminist futurism, which, in Campt’s words, include ‘attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration’. We can consider immanent critique, where reflecting on our practices and norms collectively and communicatively allows us to move together towards better practices and better norms for our community.
While some understand ‘critique’ and ‘practice’ in binary terms, we thus consider dialectically: critique is a practice, just as practices require critique. Without real critique there would only be reproduction of the same thing: superfluous technical improvements rather than digital platforms designed under completely different principles.
Critique-centred design can bring about platforms whose design choices, protocols and norms are not written in stone nor defined by an elite but instead questioned and re-constructed on the basis of bottom-up assessments, complaints and judgements.
In our own work, the critique-centred approach to design is currently more theoretical than practised, as building in communicative mechanisms for critique goes against the orthodox grain of design practice. We are taking initial steps, and we want to develop a suite of processes for practising critique-centred design.
For example, the End Everyday Racism platform asks witnesses to provide feedback on the platform and project as part of their testimony. The Whistle’s latest version allows users to sculpt the testimony platform simply and autonomously to meet their testimony-gathering aims.
Another process supporting critique-centred design is documenting the design choices that gave form to the platform, as well as the reasons behind them. In this way, users can appreciate the contingent, and therefore not given, character of such decisions.
Open source advocates have long underlined the relevance of documentation since, as nineteenth-century programmer Ada Lovelace also considered, it can allow users to understand how machines work and allow them to propose improvements of different kinds.
We have plans to include information buttons on the Whistle’s testimony platform that inform witnesses why they are being asked particular questions, and how these relate to target audience epistemologies.
Valuing Plural Critique
Rendering design choices subject to democratic deliberation can allow ordinary people and excluded groups, rather than the design elite, to take communication spaces in new directions. Without such a possibility, design would not be able to support the pluriverse.
As we discussed in Provocation 3, our suggestion is to ‘stay with the trouble’ and consider pluralism as an evolving target, shaped by emergent social justice claims and shifts in communication infrastructure. As with Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, critique-centred design assumes that what exactly a plural platform is will never get completely settled. New demands, visions and practices will keep emerging and challenging previous design choices.
Critique-centred design leaves the space for contestation open for emergent notions of democracy, pluralism and social justice to shape the affordances of platforms over time.
Critique-centred design also requires making difficult choices for the design to become reality; as with the turning point of the pluralism parabola, these will unfortunately but necessarily be exclusionary, but should remain contestable.
We support being open about design decisions and their consequences, and creating reflexive and inclusive opportunities to revisit and revise. Going back to our initial point, it is only when collective and plural critique is valued that groups holding different views and interests, and even inhabiting different worlds, can come together and address pressing global issues.
