Who Gets to Future?

Abstract

is paper draws on a collaborative project called the Africatown Activation to examine the role design practices play in contributing to (or conspiring against) the ourishing of the Black community in Sea le, Washington. Speci cally, we describe the e orts of a community group called Africatown to design and build an installation that counters decades of disinvestment and ongoing displacement in the historically Black Central Area neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that despite e orts to include community, conventional design practices may perpetuate forms of institutional racism: enabling activities of community engagement that may further legitimate racialized forms of displacement. We discuss how focusing on amplifying the legacies of imagination already at work may help us move beyond a simple reading of design as the solution to systemic forms of oppression.

"We come together as one...and hope for solidarity to live on"

“…Previous research has explored, for example, service delivery [65,67], or the role of algorithms [2] among many other aspects of justice work. HCI researchers have also looked at violence and responses to this specifically in contexts of domestic violence [14], sex work [53,62,63], human trafficking [67], gentrification [16,44], or policing [19,68]. With this paper, however, we add nuance to these debates by providing three different ways in which we can look at and understand the role of technologies in the remembrance and commemoration of victims of violence.…”

Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring

“…American community group with futuring methods reflects the need to both demystify the elite status of design and acknowledge the ways in which design practice may perpetuate forms of institutional racism and privilege [71]. Baumann et al explicitly discuss how speculative design and design fiction were used in a local participatory project, reflecting on the need to understand and communicate a community's preferable future that is "tied to local African-American cultural norms and social practices" in contrast with dominant futures espoused by Silicon Valley [5].…”

“…Unlike experimental or evaluative work of design prototypes, in which impact can be considered by its effects on particular populations under study, design futuring does not tend to hold immediate, material impact over specific persons. Nevertheless, the results of design futuring may yield very specific artifacts, institutions or organizations that affect people quite directly [71]. Even the simple scenarios of ubiquitous computing in Weiser's speculative work, Computers for the 21st Century provided a vision and guidance to multi-billion dollar industries of smartphones and Internet of Things devices [6,100].…”

“…First, we need consider how we, as researchers, can better involve people, individuals, and organizations in speculative research. Recent work in HCI and design has engaged these questions, informing co-speculators [26], media stakeholders and cultural commentators [39,40], or producing platforms for communities to express preferable futures [16,54,71,97]. In the broadest sense, there is an opportunity to consider the extent to which design futuring can become a more participatory practice.…”

Envisioning Post-Apocalyptic Futures: A Speculative Design Toolkit for Non-Designers

“…Bringing non-designers into the speculative design process has also been an increasing focus for speculative design (Farias, Bendor, and van Eekelen, 2022;O'Leary et al, 2019). There seems to be a continued appreciation of the fact that designing futures can be powerful, and enabling others to imagine futures for themselves even more so (Farias, Bendor, and van Eekelen, 2022;O'Leary et al, 2019).…”