Identifying decentered cases A difficult part of this process is identifying decentered cases and communities. This is often an issue when promoting new methodologies in any technological or corporate context where a lot of those involved have little to no connections to the harmed groups or communities and appropriate funding is not allocated for broader consultations, trust building, and research. In this document, we have established that designing from the margins can provide net gains and collateral positive impact is demonstrable. It is also a question of reframing priorities and deciding how to allocate funding. The sums of funds placed into user research and other product related research needs to also be addressed here. A quick search online states that on average 20% of software development budgets are allocated to UX (user experience) research.181 This can definitely vary (and at times be higher) depending on the type of company or technology. However, the requirement here is to have sufficient allocated funds and resources in 1) bringing on the right experts who can outline and identify the decentered communities in different contexts, and are trusted or linked to those communities, 2) adequate resources and frameworks for working with such communities outside extractive, power imbalance or profitability models and 3) place in as a high priority this work without underestimating the value of fine tuning our tech before deployment, so we move slower not to break our communities. Adequate investment in a vigorous reboot of these processes will lead to innovation, sustained success, trust-building, and return on investment. It is therefore important that those involved in making these landscape-changing shifts are adequately compensated and consulted. This document does not get into the hows on working with decentered communities after they are identified, as that deserves its own document. However, below is a suggested outline of how to understand the identification process of finding the decentered cases for DFM implementation.182
58
181
Creative.onl Ltd. 2020. How to set your UX budget: How much do companies spend on UX? • Creative. onl Ltd. [online] Available at: <https://www.creative.onl/how-to-set-your-ux-budget-how-much-docompanies-spend-on-ux/> [Accessed 6 April 2022].
182
I hope to deepen the methods here with more consultations and implementation sessions and so on in the further building of this project. See this as the initial skeleton outline.
Design From the Margins
