Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We
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Design Justice Information Policy Series Edited by Sandra Braman The Information Policy Series publishes research on and analysis of significant problems in the field of information policy, including decisions and practices that enable or constrain information, communication, and culture irrespective of the legal siloes in which they have traditionally been located, as well as state- law- society interactions. Defining information policy as all laws, regulations, and decision- making principles that affect any form of information creation, processing, flows, and use, the series includes attention to the formal decisions, decision- making processes, and entities of government; the formal and informal decisions, decision- making processes, and entities of private and public sector agents capable of constitutive effects on the nature of society; and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality that support and sustain government and governance. The parametric functions of information policy at the boundaries of social, informational, and technological systems are of global importance because they provide the context for all communications, interactions, and social processes. Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova Traversing Digital Babel: Information, e- Government, and Exchange, Alon Peled Chasing the Tape: Information Law and Policy in Capital Markets, Onnig H. Dombalagian Regulating the Cloud: Policy for Computing Infrastructure, edited by Christopher S. Yoo and Jean- François Blanchette Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, Kenneth A. Bamberger and Deirdre K. Mulligan How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Benjamin Peters Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy, Cherian George Big Data Is Not a Monolith, edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia, and Michael Mattioli Decoding the Social World: Data Science and the Unintended Consequences of Communi- cation, Sandra González- Bailón Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data, Mariel John Borowitz You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches, Josephine Wolff The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons, edited by Carleen F. Maitland Designing an Internet, David D. Clark Reluctant Power: Networks, Corporations, and the Struggle for Global Governance in the Early 20th Century, Rita Zajácz Human Rights in the Age of Platforms, edited by Rikke Frank Jørgensen The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities, Russell Newman Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State, Luzhou Li Design Justice: Community- Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza- Chock Design Justice Community- Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need Sasha Costanza- Chock The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2020 Sasha Costanza-Chock This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. Subject to such license, all rights are reserved. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Costanza- Chock, Sasha, 1976- author. Title: Design justice : community- led practices to build the worlds we need / Sasha Costanza- Chock. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2020. | Series: Information policy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019015279 | ISBN 9780262043458 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Design- - Social aspects. | Social justice. Classification: LCC NK1520 .C675 2020 | DDC 745.4- - dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015279 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Allied Media Projects, a collaborative laboratory of media-based organizing whose transformative impacts will ripple outward for generations. For Mother Cyborg and the Detroit Community Technology Project, visionaries of digital stewardship, DiscoTechs, and building the worlds we need. For two- spirit people, who survived centuries of settler colonialism and are still here, reclaiming their rightful places beside the council fires. Contents Acknowledgments ix Series Editor’s Introduction xiii Preface xvii Introduction: #TravelingWhileTrans, Design Justice, and Escape from the Matrix of Domination 1 1 Design Values: Hard- Coding Liberation? 31 2 Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us” 69 3 Design Narratives: From TXTMob to Twitter 103 4 Design Sites: Hackerspaces, Fablabs, Hackathons, and DiscoTechs 135 5 Design Pedagogies: “There’s Something Wrong with This System!” 173 Directions for Future Work: From #TechWontBuildIt to #DesignJustice 211 Glossary 237 Notes 247 References 281 Index 317 Acknowledgments This book reflects the labor of a great many people. First, there would be no design justice theory or practice as we know it without years of work from the many Design Justice Network organizers, especially Una Lee, Victoria Barnett, Wes Taylor, Carlos (L05) Garcia, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Adrienne Gaither, Taylor Stewart, Ebony Dumas, Danielle Aubert, Victor Moore, and Gracen Brilmyer, as well as the hundreds of people who have organized and taken part in design justice workshops at the Allied Media Conference since 2016. The authors of the first ver- sion of the Design Justice Network Principles are Una Lee, Jenny Lee, Melissa Moore, Wesley Taylor, Shauen Pearce, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Ebony Dumas, Heather Posten, Kristyn Sonnenberg, Sam Holleran, Ryan Hayes, Dan Herrle, Dawn Walker, Tina Hanaé Miller, Nikki Roach, Aylwin Lo, Noelle Barber, Kiwi Illafonte, Devon De Lená, Ash Arder, Brooke Toczylowski, Kristina Miller, Nancy Meza, Becca Budde, Marina Csomor, Paige Reitz, Leslie Stem, Walter Wilson, Gina Reichert, and Danny Spitzberg. Nor would this book be possible without everyone from the Tech for Social Justice Project (T4SJ), the #QTPower crew, and my Allied Media fam. Diana Nucera, especially, you’re a guiding light in the community technology movement: House of Cyborg forever! Thanks also to all the staff, research assistants, students, and commu- nity partners from the Collaborative Design Studio, too numerous to list here (explore https://codesign.mit.edu for more info). Next, profound thanks to my editors at the MIT Press, Sandra Bra- man and Gita Devi Manaktala, as well as to Melinda Rankin, Michael Sims, and Kathy Caruso, who helped greatly improve the text. Mariel x Acknowledgments García- Montes, Katie Louise Arthur, and Annis Rachel Sands each spent many hours working with me on the manuscript as research assis- tants and deserve special recognition. Maya Wagoner’s thesis project greatly informed my thinking about design pedagogy. Also, the #More- ThanCode report and the T4SJ project, the findings of which are woven throughout this book, would never have happened without the work of Maya and Berhan Taye to plan, facilitate, and conduct interviews with key practitioners across the country. That project was also built through the hard work of Caroline Rivas and Chris Schweidler. Chris, thank you for all that you do to advance participatory action research. Sky House continues to be a sanctuary. Special thanks to readers of early, often painfully dense draft chapters, especially Lilly Irani, Ruha Benjamin, Lisa Parks, Catherine D’Ignazio, Una Lee, and Alessandra Renzi. Justin Reich and Eric Klopfer provided invaluable comments on design pedagogy, and Cathy Hannabach and Summer McDonald at Ideas on Fire gave thoughtful early suggestions on the first chapter. Laura Forlano and all the organizers of the design feminisms track at Design Research Society 2018 created a space where I was able to openly discuss and further develop many of this book’s themes. Lisha Nadkarni responded to the earliest draft of the book pro- posal with key suggestions. Casey Thoreson created the index. This book would also never have happened without support from many of the faculty and staff at Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) and across MIT, especially Lisa Parks, Jim Paradis, T. L. Tay- lor, Lara Baladi, Vivek Bald, Kat Cizek, Ian Condry, Karilyn Crockett, Paloma Duong, Fox Harrell, Eric Klopfer, Lorrie LeJeune, Ken Manning, Nick Montfort, Justin Reich, Ed Schiappa, William Uricchio, Jing Wang, Andrew Whittaker, Sarah Wolozin, and Ethan Zuckerman. The MIT Pro- gram in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) has also been very kind to me, especially Helen Lee and Emily Hiestand, as has MIT CoLab, in particular Dayna Cunningham, Phil Thompson, and Ceasar McDowell. Others who provided great support and encouragement along the way include Arturo Escobar, Sadie Red Wing, Lina Dencik and the Data Jus- tice project, and Joy Buolamwini. Acknowledgments xi Gracias a Shey Rivera, Dey Hernández, Luana Morales, Jasmine Gomez, Luis Cotto, y a todo el corillo de boricuas brillantes que da vida, amor y rabia en la lluvia con nieve de Boston. Thank you to my mothers, Carol Chock (who provided a much- appreciated final round of review) and Barbara Zimbel, and my fathers, Peter Costanza and Paul Mazzarella. You’ve all been so wonderful and supportive over the years. A Yara Liceaga Rojas: gracias en todas las dimensiones posibles e imposibles. También a Sol, Elías, e Inarú, semillas de un futuro mejor. Series Editor’s Introduction