Reflection3-Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
The book I read recently is called “Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need”. The author is Sasha Costanza-Chock. The 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.”
Before I choose the book on the list, I search for some books I am interested in the name. this book get a relatively high score of 4.33 on the Goodreads website. one of the book reviews of this book said that
“This one has been my favorite of the tech + social justice books I’ve read. It’s clearly structured and loaded with examples of what various organizations are or aren’t doing to work towards design justice.”
The review inspires me to read this book cause in my own experience when I design something no matter before having this class or doing the class project, actually, I never think about social justice toward my design. I just have the idea and to do it. I am both interested in the topic of this book and want to learn what I can improve in my future design.
The book in general is interesting, and it mentions many points that I would overlook in terms of design. For example, the process of designing for people with disabilities. Moreover, I had heard of AB/test before but didn’t know much about it, this book provided some examples to help me understand the concept more vividly.
But to some extent, due to the topic of this book, it includes many unfamiliar terms from gender and race studies like cisgender, heteropatriarchy, and matrix of domination, which require more time to understand the background and read carefully to the explanation at the end of the book.
One paragraph in the book states:
“The poor fit between Facebook’s affordances and basic activist needs partly explains the existence of an entire ecosystem of dedicated activist Constituent Relationship Management systems (CRMs), such as SalsaCommons, NationBuilder, and Action Network. These platforms, designed around the needs of community organizers and political campaigners, have built-in features, interface elements, and capabilities that match the core processes of building campaigns…. Yet such platforms remain niche services, used by only a relatively tiny group of professionalized campaigners. Instead, most people, including social movement activists, organizers, and participants, use the most popular corporate social network sites and hosted services as tools to advance our goals.”
Since we have more professional tools, why is the time, energy, and brilliance of so many designers, software developers, product managers, and others who work on platforms focused on optimizing our digital world to capture and monetize our attention? Why we are not focused on other potential goals like maximizing civic engagement, making environmentally sustainable choices, building empathy, or achieving any one of near-infinite alternate desirable outcomes. I think we have to recognize these things and focus on these more deserving elements when making designs in the future. Just like we make a project on how to change the climate in class, we should focus more on how our individual behavior can make society better.
Another example is focused on “Disability Simulation Is Discredited; Lived Experience Is Nontransferable”
“In disability simulation, “a nondisabled person is asked to navigate an environment in a wheelchair in order, supposedly, to gain a better understanding of the experiences of disabled persons. These ‘simulations’ produce an unrealistic understanding of the life experience of disability for several reasons: the nondisabled person does not have the alternate skill sets developed by [Disabled people], and thus overestimates the loss of function which disability presents, and is furthermore likely to think of able-normative solutions rather than solutions more attuned to a [Disabled person’s] life experience.”
In my view, a design justice approach goes further still: beyond “robust engagement,” design teams should be led by in other ways be formally accountable to marginalized users. Similarly, in our design process as well in our class, we should clarify the persona of the project and think carefully about the characteristics of persona and get their needs according to this. Moreover, we should invite people who match our target users to help test the prototype and iterate continuously.
