Design Values : Hard-Coding Liberation?

Chapter 1 addresses the question, “What values do we encode and reproduce in the objects and systems that we design?” It argues that, currently, the values of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and settler colonialism are too often reproduced in the affordances and disaffordances of the objects, processes, and systems that we design. The chapter begins with a story about using Facebook to organize a trans*, queer, and immigrant solidarity protest and uses that experience to open a critical conversation with the literature on affordances, disaffordances, discriminatory design, and cognitive load. Although design affordances are often assumed to be universal, the chapter argues that they are actually unequally distributed based on the matrix of domination. The next section briefly discusses approaches such as value-sensitive design, universal design, and inclusive design. Over time, these have produced much-needed shifts in design theory and practice, and design justice builds upon them but also differs in important ways. The chapter also draws on feminist and antiracist strands within science and technology studies to unpack the ways that the matrix of domination is constantly hard-coded into designed objects and systems. This typically takes place not because designers are intentionally “malicious” but through unintentional mechanisms, including assumptions about “unmarked” end users, the use of systematically biased data sets to train algorithms using machine-learning techniques, and limited feedback loops. Addressing these issues requires that we retool for design justice, and the chapter analyzes various design concepts and tools, such as differential cognitive load, intersectional instrumentation, benchmarking, and A/B testing, through a design justice lens. It ends with a question about what it might mean to hard-code liberation