design thinking won't save us

Prompt: Use 3-6 authors or media from our semester to discuss ONE of the essays we read on the last day of class [by R. Benjamin, T. Terranova, or H. Tawil-Souri] – your essay should not exceed 700 words (10 points)

Benjamin’s articulation of technology’s role in the “New Jim Code,” and its potential (and extant usage) instead to function in liberatory ways, can be understood in terms of De Lara’s framework that the social logics in which technology is produced and operated rather than the technology itself “were what made technologies into powerful social processes.” (1)

The valorization of “design” as a means of actually solving problems often elevates designers while taking agency away from those actually experiencing the problems, Benjamin writes (2). The task of “empathizing” with “users” masks the fact that this empathy ultimately serves “the human paying the designer’s bill,” with users’ interests only considered insofar as they align with that purpose. In venture-backed startups, the imperative underlying all design is to find a “need” for which a solution will proliferate “exponentially”, laying the foundations for a potential billion-dollar company — the logic of the early-stage investments that drive them. The designers are truly solving at least some problem in their customers’ lives, so many believe they are changing the world for the better: in this case the design process functions to “sanitize and make palatable deep-seated injustices, contained within the innovative practices of design.” (3) Examples of embedded injustices are easy to point out once they are looked for: Wang outlines how PredPol reconstructs the very crime it ostensibly tackles by encoding policing patterns as risk, Roberts and Sand how gene science legitimate socially constructed racism, and Noble how Google Search constructs the pornographic white male gaze as race- and gender-neutral (4).

Benjamin argues that design thinking “erases the insights and agency of those who are discounted because they are not designers…coaxing everyone who dons the cloak of design into being seen and heard through the dominant aesthetic of innovation,” questioning rhetorically, “in the breathless race for newer, faster, better technology, what ways of thinking, being, and organizing social life are potentially snuffed out?” (5) De Lara’s framework answers: design thinking assumes the logic of innovation as the foundation for technology, disallowing its non-capitalist usage, and non-capitalist logics altogether.

Similarly, Bonacich et. al describe Western consumer boycotts of products produced in the Global South as usually ineffective, more likely with detrimental effects for workers — leaving them “robbed of a much needed job without any choice in the matter” — rather than supportive ones (6). Like designers who selectively consider real problems faced by their users but manipulate this knowledge for their own or their employers’ gain (intentionally or unintentionally: the capitalist logic that design is carried out within in drives this, not individual stances), from boycotts “the only people who benefit are the boycotters, who can feel better about themselves,” Bonacich et. al write. In contrast, Benjamin articulates the alternative framing required for effective solidarity work: “we must demand…not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation.” (7) For Bonacich et. al, not liberatory consumption but plain old liberation is needed — an example that makes the absurdity of the first proposition clear.

Benjamin presents a variety of ideas for what “abolitionist tools” can look like, including the demystification of data-driven tools, “equity” labels on machine learning models highlighting inequities in their datasets and narrative tools as education materials in addition to data (8). These ideas challenge the logic surrounding technology rather than the technology in isolation. Furthermore, this challenge must be coupled with “creative alternatives that bring to life liberating and joyful ways of living in and organizing our world,” Benjamin writes: the creation of new logics to subvert the hegemonic capitalist and racist ones, for “[t]o see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be.” (9) Benjamin references on multiple occasions the Detroit Community Technology Project, for example, which works to install internet infrastructure that is community-owned and operated rather than operated by a company for profit — tackling internet insecurity not by changing internet technology, but by changing the logic through which it is produced and operated. While technology and society ultimately “coproduce” each other, technology produced without recognition of the logic containing it will overwhelmingly perpetuate that logic rather than challenge it in any way.

Sources:

1. De Lara 152
2. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 118
3. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 117
4. Wang 242, Roberts 214, Sand 274, Noble 58
5. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 117
6. Bonacich et. al 11
7. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 118
8. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 122-126
9. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 127, 129