Authors:
Shamika Klassen
I am happy to announce that I have just successfully defended a dissertation about how Black women, femmes, and nonbinary people imagine the future of technology. Why did I do this work and how does it relate to HCI and UX and the future of computing infrastructures? My work is focused on how we imagine everyone's experience into how we build the sociotechnical infrastructures that increasingly are the fabric of our lives. Who is inspiring me to think now, and why do I think they matter? Read on…
Ruha Benjamin is a major influence because she calls out how the imagination can support alternative and fruitful paths forward. Imagination: A Manifesto explores the sinister side of imaginations that yielded the hierarchical and damaging systems of racism and white supremacy.
Imagination: A Manifesto is a quick but provocative read that focuses on personal imagination and its role in the fabric of our society. Benjamin, whose Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want was published in October 2023, outlines how the eugenic and carceral nature of many powerful imaginations limit so much of our lives—including the lives of people who position themselves in power.
That may be us in the HCI community.
Never one to leave her audience steeped in the problems, Benjamin ends the book with uplifting narratives and examples of how imagination can change, and is changing, our lives on micro and macro levels. It is not so much an unadulterated celebration of the imagination and its positive applications as it is a lesson for us all as we think about the design and engineering of sociotechnical systems.
Another book that is influencing me and how I'd like to influence the design of technologies is The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression, & Reflection, an anthology of 65 contributions from Black designers across mediums and experiences. I first heard about this book when I was studying Afrofuturism, an area that combines Black artistic expressions and narratives that position us as fully human, unencumbered by oppression, past, present, and feared for in the future, and able to embrace our highest joy. I have been referencing the book in my work ever since I picked it up.
The essays cover design practices, design education, design scholarship, activism and liberatory spaces in design, and much more. One of my favorites is "What Type of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?" by Adah Parris. Parris's perspective helps us understand how to challenge technology as it has been and will be designed. We are all familiar with the blockchain. Consider a (re)imagining to reflect Benjamin's Imagination: The blockchain, when viewed through a more expansive lens, can encompass ecological technologies such as those found in ancient pre-Columbian Mexico like chinampas. This is an agricultural technique that relies on small, rectangular plots of land on a lake bed used for crops. The approach is an example of a decentralized distribution system. Despite being designed centuries ago for analog rather than digital spaces, chinampas showcase a web of production that existed way before Web3. The expertise and experiences of Black designers compiled in this anthology is a true look at where we have come from and where we are going in the discipline and practice of design.
Science fiction has entranced us all! From W.E.B. Du Bois's The Comet to Octavia Butler's Parables series, we have all had some encounter with the future as imagined by authors of science fiction.
Imagination: A Manifesto is a quick but provocative read that focuses on personal imagination and its role in the fabric of our society.
I care about science fiction as much as social justice issues within my area of speculative design with marginalized people because of its potential to influence us all to think and design differently.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements showcases a number of writers who address justice, injustice, and how both can be constructed. A couple of examples that really piqued my interest: "Lalibela," by Gabriel Teodros, transports us to northern Ethiopia, where a time traveler from the 11th century is shaken by how the thriving civilization he left has shifted in modern times. The story challenges us to think about what is lost with "progress." And amid the themes of capitalism's ailments, the profitability of carceral systems at the expense of marginalized lives, and wonderings about how to stage effective revolutions across the book, "Evidence," by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, explores what would happen if humanity got it all right in a hopeful and inspiring missive from the future.
Why does this matter to us in HCI, UX, and the engineering of platforms? Daniel M. Russell and Svetlana Yarosh [1] point to science fiction as inspiration for technology limited in part by the biases of its authors. And, as I argue, along with Christina Harrington and Yolanda Rankin, the canon of fodder for technology design lacks contributions from BIPOC authors [2]. How would innovation change if more people's imaginations could influence what is possible?
I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
References
1. Russell, D.M. and Yarosh, S. Can we look to science fiction for innovation in HCI? Interactions 25, 2 (Mar.–Apr. 2018), 36–40; https://doi.org/10.1145/3178552
2. Harrington, C.N., Klassen, S., and Rankin, Y.A. "All that you touch, you change": Expanding the canon of speculative design towards Black futuring. Proc. of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2022, Article 450, 1–10; https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502118
Author
After graduating from Stanford with a degree in African and African-American studies, Shamika Klassen served a year with AmeriCorps in New York City. She then studied technology and ethics in a Master of Divinity program at Union Theological Seminary. She is a doctoral graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder. [email protected]
Copyright held by author
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2024 ACM, Inc.
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