Emma Willard’s Temple of Time (1846)
Last major update, October 2018*
For years, I’ve asked software engineers and designers I run into at conference if they know about gender HCI (human-computer interaction), feminist HCI, or post-colonial computing. More recently, I’ve added intersectional HCI, anti-oppressive design, and design justice to the list as well. The response is usually something along the lines of “sounds interesting, but never heard of it.”
Which is a shame. These fields have some great insights about how to create software that works better for everybody. A very brief overview:
- Gender HCI focuses on the differences in how different genders interact with computers
- Feminist HCI is concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems that are imbued with sensitivity to the central commitments of feminism — agency, fulfillment, identity and the self, equity, empowerment, diversity, and social justice.
- Post-colonial Computing centers on the questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility in the contexts of cultural encounter, particularly in the context of contemporary globalization
- Intersectional HCI is a framework for engaging with the complexity of users’ and authors’ identities, and situating these identities in relation to their contextual surroundings.
- Anti-oppressive design “considers both the values embedded in technological design and the environment that surrounds how a technology is built and researched.”
- Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism), and is also a growing social movement
At some level it’s not surprising that this work isn’t as well known as it should be. Much of this work has been done by women of color, queer and trans people, and others who are marginalized within the tech world. Much of this is heavily influenced by the social sciences, which are also marginalized by tech. And much of this work is also by the kinds of biases against that anti-oppressive research that Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and I discuss in What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing.**
So here are some slightly longer overviews of these different areas, each featuring a handful of key papers, along with a few videos. As you read this, Like any literature survey, what’s here is filtered through my background and interests; if there’s other work that you think should be here, please let me know!
Continue reading Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, and Post-Colonial Computing