[liberationtech] Stanford HCI Seminar 11/14, Shaowen Bardzell — Utopias of Participation: Working Towards Emancipatory Forms of Computing

[Yosem Companys]

From: Michael Bernstein <msb at cs.stanford.edu>

Shaowen Bardzell, Indiana University
Utopias of Participation: Working Towards Emancipatory Forms of Computing

November 14, 2014, 12:50-2:05pm, Gates B03 · Open to the public
CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and
Design)
http://hci.st/seminar
http://cs547.stanford.edu/speaker.php?date=2014-11-14

>From its earliest incarnation in labor movements in Scandinavia in the
1970s, Participatory Design has had an emancipatory politics inscribed in
it. As PD is appropriated in other contexts, this emancipatory politics can
continue to be foregrounded or, as Bannon & Ehn (2013) worry, it can be
diluted into corporate practices of "user-centered design." One way to
advance the emancipatory politics in PD is to continue PD's early embrace
of utopian thinking. Yet utopianism today has a poor reputation, openly
rejected by many activists. In this talk, I will revisit some of the
criticisms of utopianism, in particular, the dismissal of utopianism in
Dunne & Raby's work on Critical Design. Next, I will explore an alternative
framing of utopianism-derived from feminism and science fiction
studies-that could productively inform PD, both epistemologically and
methodologically, in its most openly political design goals. I will present
some of the ways I have tied to engage with these ideas through design
research projects ranging in scale from critical-participatory studies
involving local makers to designing for and about the identities and
aspirations of entire urban populations.


Shaowen Bardzell is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and
Computing at Indiana University and the Affiliated Faculty of the Kinsey
Institute. Known for her work in feminist HCI, Bardzell's research centers
on a network of concepts of interest to both feminists and HCI, including
scientifically rigorous and socially just research methodologies, human
sexuality, embodiment, marginality, collective creativity, and everyday
aesthetics. Recent work has focused on exploring the intersections between
HCI's rising interest in social change and feminist social science,
critical design, material interactions, and the application of critical and
cultural theories for developing concept-driven design strategies. Her work
is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Intel Science and
Technology Center on Social Computing program. Bardzell is on the editorial
board of the journal Interacting with Computers and Journal of Peer
Production. She is the co-author of Humanistic HCI in the Synthesis
Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics (Morgan & Claypool Publishers,
forthcoming), and a co-editor of Critical Theory and Interaction Design
(MIT Press, forthcoming). She directs the Cultural Research In Technology
(CRIT) Group at Indiana University.
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