Reflections on Design Methods for Underserved Communities

Dillahunt, Tawanna R.; Erete, Sheena; Galusca, Roxana; Israni, Aarti; Nacu, Denise; Sengers, Phoebe

doi:10.1145/3022198.3022664

Cited by 28 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The Algorithmic Equity Toolkit is the outcome of an iterative participatory design process that spanned March 2019 to March 2020. Drawing inspiration from other community-based and participatory action research, the project began with the stated needs of partnering organizations and evolved through the course of an action-reflection cycle [18,20,26]. In addition to our collaborators in partnering organizations, our core team consisted of a mix of students and researchers with expertise in policy analysis, qualitative research, human-centered design, computer science, data science, information ethics, and sociology.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Action-Oriented AI Policy Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

Krafft

Young

Katell

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

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Motivated by the extensive documented disparate harms of artificial intelligence (AI), many recent practitioner-facing reflective tools have been created to promote responsible AI development. However, the use of such tools internally by technology development firms addresses responsible AI as an issue of closed-door compliance rather than a matter of public concern. Recent advocate and activist efforts intervene in AI as a public policy problem, inciting a growing number of cities to pass bans or other ordinances on AI and surveillance technologies. In support of this broader ecology of political actors, we present a set of reflective tools intended to increase public participation in technology advocacy for AI policy action. To this end, the Algorithmic Equity Toolkit (the AEKit) provides a practical policy-facing definition of AI, a flowchart for * † ‡ Contributed equally.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Action-Oriented AI Policy Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

Krafft

Young

Katell

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

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“…As scholars of critical race theory, education, and computing have pointed out, a strategy that prioritizes inclusion might ignore and leave intact the power structures that produce exclusion in the first place (Benjamin 2016;Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al 2020;Zamudio et al 2010). Instead, others have argued for incorporating minoritized communities themselves in accounting for the value that computing brings to their activities, an accounting which, although bound up with access, might not be limited to an interest in individual use or non-use of artifacts or platforms (Crooks 2019a;Dillahunt et al 2017;Harrington, Borgos-Rodriguez, and Piper 2019).…”

Section: Conclusion: Community Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

Crooks¹

2022

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This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities. I use the digital divide framework—a 1990s policy diagnosis that argues that the growth and success of the internet would bifurcate the public into digital “haves” and “have-nots”—as a lens to look at why access to computing frequently appears as a means to achieve economic, political, and social equality for racialized and minoritized communities. First, I present a brief cultural history of computer-assisted instruction to show that widely-held assumptions about the educational utility of computing emerged from utopian narratives about scientific progress and innovation—narratives that also traded on raced and gendered assumptions about users of computers. Next, I use the advent of the digital divide framework and its eventual transformation into digital inequality research to show how those raced and gendered norms about computing and computer users continue to inform research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in educational contexts. This is important because the norms implicated in digital divide research are also present in other sites where technology and civic life intersect, including democratic participation, public health, and immigration, among others. I conclude by arguing that naïve or cynical deployments of computing technology can actually harm or exploit the very same racialized and minoritized communities that access is supposed to benefit. In short, access to computing in education—or in any other domain—can only meaningfully contribute to equality when minoritized and racialized communities are allowed to pursue their own collective goals.

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“…Finally, Feminist HCI researchers have valued lived experience by undertaking intentional and sensitive co-design with particular groups such as breastfeeding parents [91] and sex workers [85]. These relationships between researchers and vulnerable subjects, mediated by participatory design practices, are complex and involve differentials in social power, and have themselves been the focus of much research and reflection [36,40,45,52].…”

Section: Feminist Hci For Minoritized People Stigmatized Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

"The Personal is Political"

D’Ignazio

Michelson

Hope

et al. 2020

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Initially conceived as problem-focused programming events, hackathons have expanded to encompass a range of issue areas, stakeholders and activities. There have been important critiques of hackathons in relation to their format and structure, their epistemological assumptions, and their outputs and impacts. Scholars working in Feminist HCI have proposed design considerations for more inclusive hackathons that focus on social justice outcomes for marginalized groups. Evaluative work on hackathons has assessed entrepreneurial contributions, skill development, and affective impacts, but largely absent from the analysis is a view of longterm personal impacts on participants. What kinds of lasting impacts (if any) do issue-focused hackathons have on participants themselves? In this paper, we describe a post-hoc qualitative study with participants and organizers of a postpartum health hackathon in the U.S., one year after the event took place. Our goals were to understand people's motivations for participating, what impact (if any) their participation had on their lives, and how (if at all) their participation shaped how they now understand postpartum health. Our findings indicate that the hackathon functioned as a space of "feminist consciousness raising" in that it provided space for navigating and sharing personal experiences, contextualizing and connecting those experiences to structural oppression, and developing participants' self-and collective-efficacy to create design interventions and enact social change. Feminist consciousness raising is not just "awareness-raising", but rather a specific historic and contemporary practice which we describe and situate in relation to personal experiences of oppression around stigmatized topics. With these findings, we situate feminist consciousness raising in relation to the literature on hackathons and Feminist HCI, speculate which aspects of the design of the event led to it fostering feminist consciousness raising, and generate recommendations for how to intentionally bring feminist consciousness raising to the design of hackathons and innovation events. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Participatory design; • Social and professional topics → Race and ethnicity; Gender.

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Reflections on Design Methods for Underserved Communities

Cited by 28 publications

References 12 publications

An Action-Oriented AI Policy Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

An Action-Oriented AI Policy Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

"The Personal is Political"

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