PhD Course - Critical Participatory Research and Design

June 2 - June 3

—

Please note:

Deadline for applications is May 23, 2022. How to sign up, prerequisites, etc. is listed below.

—

Dates of the course

2^nd-3^rd June 2022, 9.00 –16.00

Organizers and facilitators

PhD fellows Barbara Nino Carreras (she/her), Lara Reime (she/her), Camilla Vesterberg Christensen (she/her), and Associate Professor, Joanna Saad-Sulonen (she/her)

Lecturers

Laura Forlano (she/her), Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design (ID) and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology
Jesper Holten (he/him), Executive Member at the Danish Association of the Blind
Katrine Meldgaard Kjær (she/her), Associate Professor at ITU
Katta Spiel (they/them), FWF Hertha-Firnberg scholar at the HCI Group of TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology
Joanna Saad-Sulonen (she/her), Associate Professor at ITU
Line Henriksen (she/her), Postdoc at Malmø University

Course description and learning outcomes

This course explores critical and intersectional approaches to participatory research and design. By bridging creative writing, ethnographic methods, and critical participatory design, we will focus on diverse perspectives that are excluded from current technological development. During the course we will examine and rethink design methods and research practices that reproduce social inequalities.

Intersectional feminist theories have introduced critical design practices that are driven by marginalized groups, whose embodied and affective experiences are understood as expert knowledge (i.e., Costanza-Chock 2020). Such perspectives continue to gain relevance as practices of design and research still reproduce structural inequalities today. For example, Ruha Benjamin (2019) and Meredith Broussard (2018) point to the ways technological development can marginalize, discriminate, and exclude people of color. STS scholar, Ashlew Shew (2020), also argues that despite the history of disability rights, disabled people continue to be excluded from technology development due to discrimination.

Social justice movements provide generative critical approaches to grapple with power imbalances in research and design. As Sasha Constanza-Chock discusses in Design Justice – Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, increasingly more scholars advocate design and research projects driven by diverse communities, including BIPOC, queer/trans/non-binary and disabled people.

Drawing on this work, the course will support students in adopting more inclusive and non-extractive research and design practices. During the course, lectures will support students in writing and discussing their positionality and privileges as researchers, as well as helping students subvert assumptions about ‘users’ of technology, with care and reflexivity.

The course invites participants to engage with questions such as:

What theoretical foundations can we draw on to examine questions of power and oppression in relation to design and technology development, as a collaborative and contested practice?
How can we, as designers or researchers, produce more just forms of knowledge?
How can we foster more equitable relations through writing and participatory design?
Who benefits from our research and who can potentially be harmed by it? How can we minimize harm?
How can we disrupt assumptions embedded in user journeys or personas as design methods?
How can we write ourselves in our projects to situate our knowledge production practices and create alliances across differences?

Learning Outcomes

1. To reflect in writing about your own positionality in your project, either through your own lived experiences or by writing about your situated knowledge.

2. To draw on critical participatory design literature to disrupt assumptions embedded in user journeys or personas as design methods.

3. To analyze how issues of power and oppression reside in research and design practices.

4. To discuss non-extractive research and design practices that forge alliances with research participants and the communities impacted by the student’s research.

Format and program

The course consists of two days of lectures, writing workshops, and plenum discussions moderated by lecturers who work at the intersection of critical participatory design, creative writing, and social justice. During the course, students will be guided in their writing process and supported to reflect on their positionality as researchers.

Language

The course is planned to be taught in English.

Course Accessibility

As part of the application, students can request accessibility considerations to be implemented in the course. This includes, but is not limited to considerations regarding breaks, particular learning pacing, language, physical or digital access, avoiding perfumes in class, hybrid format, the use of live captions via PowerPoint, and any other request that accommodate the diversity of students that wish to attend the course.

Credits

Number of hours the student is expected to use on the course

Application: 2

Reading: 50

Participation: 14

Exam: 10

Total: 76 hours (ECTS =2.5)

Prerequisites

PhD students at all levels and with all backgrounds can participate. However, the course might be most relevant for students in the field of STS (Science and Technology Studies), anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), and digital design (service design).

Exam

Students will have the opportunity to write two memos during the course. The exam consists of an edited version of the memos written in class and an additional section (max. 400 words) reflecting on the student’s positionality in their research. The exam will be a maximum of 2 pages long.

Sign Up

Submit 300 words (as a Word or PDF) to PhD Fellow Barbara Nino (barb@itu.dk). Explain why you want to participate in the course. In the same document, we invite you to request any accessibility considerations that the organizing team should consider.

Deadline for applications

May 23, 2022.

Participants

15 PhD students from different universities. If more than 15 students apply, priority is given to students that work with and/or are part of underrepresented communities.

Detailed Schedule

TBA on May 6, 2022

Readings

Thursday June 2: Social Justice in Research and Technology Development

Readings June 2, 2022

Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us” by Sasha Constaza-Chok: https://design-justice.pubpub.org/pub/cfohnud7/release/
Shew, Ashley. “Ableism, Technoableism, and Future AI.” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine39, no. 1 (March 2020): 40– 85. https://doi.org/10.1109/MTS.2020.2967492. Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience5, no. 1 (April 1, 2019): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607.
Forlano, Laura. “Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience3, no. 2 (October 19, 2017): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843.
Bennett, Cynthia L., and Daniela K. Rosner. “The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the ‘Other.’” In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. CHI ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300528.
Hamraie, Aimi. “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design.” Disability Studies Quarterly33, no. 4 (September 5, 2013). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3871
Agid S and Akama Y (2018) Dance of designing: Rethinking position, relation, and movement in service design. ServDes 2018 Proceedings. Milan, Italy, 18-20 June 2018: 800-811. Milan, Italy: POLIMI.

Friday, June 3: Participation and Intersectional Alliances Through Research and Design

Readings June 3, 2022

Brulé, Emeline, and Katta Spiel. 2019. ‘Negotiating Gender and Disability Identities in Participatory Design’. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities, 218–27. C&T ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328320.3328369.
Endaltseva, Alexandra, and Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent. 2021. ‘Embodiment in Ethnographic Collaborations: Composition, Movement, and Pausing within the Multiple Sclerosis Society in Russia’. Science & Technology Studies 34 (3): 38–54. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.96101.
Roberts, Dorothy, and Sujatha Jesudason. “MOVEMENT INTERSECTIONALITY: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race10, no. 2 (ed 2013): 313–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X13000210.
Spiel, Katta, Os Keyes, Ashley Marie Walker, Michael A. DeVito, Jeremy Birnholtz, Emeline Brulé, Ann Light, et al. 2019. ‘Queer(Ing) HCI: Moving Forward in Theory and Practice’. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–4. CHI EA ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3311750.
Bennett, Cynthia L., Burren Peil, and Daniela K. Rosner. “Biographical Prototypes: Reimagining Recognition and Disability in Design.” In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 35–47. DIS ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322376.
Henriksen, Line, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær, Marie Blønd, Marisa Cohn, Baki Cakici, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Pedro Ferreira, Viktoriya Feshak, Simy Kaur Gahoonia, and Sunniva Sandbukt. “Writing Bodies and Bodies of Text: Thinking Vulnerability through Monsters.” Gender, Work & Organization 29, no. 2 (2022): 561–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12782.

Complementary Readings (optional)

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Wong, Alice, ed. 2021. Disability Visibility (Adapted for Young Adults): 17 First-Person Stories for Today. New York: Delacorte Press.
Keyes, Os, Burren Peil, Rua M. Williams, and Katta Spiel. 2020. ‘Reimagining (Women’s) Health: HCI, Gender and Essentialised Embodiment’. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 27 (4): 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3404218.
“Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?” 2020. In Design Justice. https://design-justice.pubpub.org/pub/3h2zq86d/release/1.
Spiel, Katta. 2021. ‘The Bodies of TEI: Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction’. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 1–19. TEI ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3440651