Designing against the status quo

Abstract

Innovation. Transformation. Disruption. These buzzwords suggest that the impacts of new technologies are all somehow revolutionary. Yet despite micro-disruptions to specific practices, new computing tools often fall short, reinforcing the status quo in new material forms. A smartphone appeals with the promise of working from the beach instead of the office; a worker breaks free from the office jail, only to be enrolled in expectations to be ever more available, on the clock even when supposedly on vacation at the beach. The oppression of the office has not been disrupted; instead, its reach has only expanded.The re-entrenchment of the status quo often entails the simultaneous reinforcement of inequity. Uber and Lyft transform the taxi industry. The consumer experience is more blissful than ever: A GPS-based app puts a car at your beck and call; no need to walk to a commercial corridor to hail a cab; no miscommunicated street crossings. Liberated from exclusionary licensing systems, anyone can be an independent digital entrepreneur driving on their own schedule. Uber even offers a subprime leasing program for drivers without good credit; payments are auto-deducted from a driver's paycheck; lessees lose the freedom to work on competing platforms or pursue other jobs; drivers sleep in their vehicles, work 12-plus-hour shifts, and default on their payments.Within the HCI community, there is growing interest in leveraging design as an agent of change in large-scale social challenges like sustainability, labor politics, and sexism. Yet the methodological repertoire we know is ill suited to the task. Practicing a traditional user-centered design process-one widely adopted in industry and taught in universities-would have us researching existing practices and needs in order to design technologies that might comfortably fit into existing routines. If we truly want to innovate, transform, and disrupt, we need new ways of working.In this article, we report on a set of conversations that grew out of a workshop held at DIS 2016 [1]. We explore how we might innovate in both method and outcome to design interactive systems that are responsive to current and future societal challenges. In contrast to user-centered design, we look for ways to design against the status quo, working to thwart the routines, habits, and norms of a social life that is inequitable and unsustainable.

Beyond Parental Control: Designing Adolescent Online Safety Apps Using Value Sensitive Design

“…However, students still developed a limited number of features intended primarily for teens and focused heavily on less privacy invasive parental monitoring features. As such, we would like to highlight important methodological design implications for HCI researchers who leverage VSD methods—it is difficult to get people to design against the status quo—Khovanskaya et al (2018) explains that rarely do we explore possibilities that go beyond societal norms to innovate technologies that go beyond (or even against) the status quo. Therefore, it is important to work deliberately to find opportunities that can give new perspectives to change.…”

“…Therefore, it is important to work deliberately to find opportunities that can give new perspectives to change. Khovanskaya et al (2018) suggest a series of questions for researchers to use during the design process; these include the following: (a) “What is the status quo, and what needs to be changed?” (b) “What are the limits of design?” (c) “Who disagrees” or “who gives permission?” and (d) “What’s at stake?” (p. 4). We suggest that such questions should be asked when trying to reconceptualize adolescent online safety apps in a way that is developmentally beneficial to adolescents as we strive to keep them safe online.…”

Troubling Design

“…More recently, it was proposed that "Queer HCI, in its theoryand queering-based strand, works to analyse and challenge the structures and norms underlying sexism, i.e., the rigid classification of humanity into static forms, through troubling" . Although Queer HCI use troubling to address sexism and gender norms, recent calls in HCI have been made for using troubling more broadly to design against the status quo without necessarily relating this to gender norms or structures underlying sexism [Harmon et al 2016;Khovanskaya et al 2018]. In these calls, tactics of troubling are considered "appealing because they aim to intervene more indeterminately and as refusal to dictate what is right-creating space for alternative values to emerge and allowing for processes of becoming" [Khovanskaya et al 2018].…”

“…Although Queer HCI use troubling to address sexism and gender norms, recent calls in HCI have been made for using troubling more broadly to design against the status quo without necessarily relating this to gender norms or structures underlying sexism [Harmon et al 2016;Khovanskaya et al 2018]. In these calls, tactics of troubling are considered "appealing because they aim to intervene more indeterminately and as refusal to dictate what is right-creating space for alternative values to emerge and allowing for processes of becoming" [Khovanskaya et al 2018]. In contributing to previous definitions of troubling, Light has proposed the concept of "troubling futures," which brings together anthropology and participatory design in understanding cultures and moving them toward sustainable living [Light 2015].…”

“…Troubling design presents a partial perspective, because it is situated in my design practice and my partial reading of the literary tradition of troubling, but I aim to support an openness and pluralism in exactly how the methodology can be put into practice in other design researcher's positions, beyond my design program on intimate technologies in women's health. This includes how the action of troubling could be used in designing more-than-human worlds [Galloway and Caudwell 2018], telling neglected stories related to craft practices in the history of technology [Rosner and Ames 2014;Posch et al 2019], designing with the body [Höök 2018], or more broadly support design against the status quo [Khovanskaya et al 2018]. As troubling design produces analytic and generative design knowledge, designers and researchers can use the program in two ways.…”