ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 2

Antwi Akom

Department of Ethnic Studies

University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State Unviersity

Tessa Cruz

Director of Engagement and Design at Streetwyze

Catherine D’Ignazio

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andrea Matwyshyn

Professor of Law and Engineering

Penn State

Daniel Susser

Assistant Professor

College of Information Sciences and Technology

Penn State

Daniel Susser: The theme of this symposium has been “Design Consequences” and one implication of that formulation is that the choices designers, architects, engineers, and others make have ramifications that need to be interrogated and, in some cases, contested. Something that came through in all your talks is that design does not operate in a vacuum. It is both a cause and an effect of the broader social, political, economic, and other background conditions in which we live. As a result, not thinking through the choices we make when we design our physical and digital environments can be just as problematic as intentionally designing to harm. Without awareness, we are likely to perpetuate existing systems of power, hierarchy, and oppression.

Each of you are working in fields that are becoming more sensitive to this reality. To help the audience understand what is at stake in the projects that you have articulated, I’d like to ask what might happen if we fail to engage in the kind of critical work that you are prescribing? We are living through a moment of intense social, economic, political, and technological rupture and there is reason to believe things won’t simply be the same in ten or twenty years. How do things look down the road if we fail to adopt the critical perspectives that you all have articulated in your talks?

Antwi Akom: If we do not begin to design for equity and design for justice, I think we will experience an exacerbation of the inequalities that are we see today: from a racial perspective, from a gender perspective, from a sexual orientation perspective, and, disproportionately, from a health perspective. Some of our world’s most vulnerable populations bear the brunt when we don’t design for equity and justice, so I think it is critical that we chart a new, different course.

Catherine D’Ignazio: I agree with everything Antwi just said. The stakes are really high, and I feel that we are in an apocalyptic moment right now, with pandemics, murders, wildfires, and droughts. There are so many intertwined crises, and we can’t continue to ignore them. We need to think about how we design for justice and equity. For those of us who are educators, we must ask how we can transform education about justice and equity so that our fields are no longer blind to some of the consequences of our choices.

The other speakers today are well positioned to articulate what that new course looks like. Climate change and income inequality are growing problems and two of the most pressing issues of this generation. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but if we don’t take these things seriously, we won’t exist as a people, as human beings moving into the future. When you see the impacts of our decisions – the heat waves, the droughts, and the fires – it becomes clear that we need massive behavioral changes. We need to design for equity and justice. We need to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts.

Our spaces and places, our datasets, and everything else is impacted by systemic oppressions. How do we stop ignoring such oppressions and pretending they don’t exist? How do we focus on them and make that the focus for training the next generation of designers, data scientists, and urban planners? Because this is going to be an intergenerational thing. I hope that we can use this moment to make a big shift in education, as well as civic and political engagement.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I am going take this question in a very practical direction. One of the methods I use to engage students is to give them corollary movie watching assignments in addition to their regular readings. In technology spaces, the plethora of movies that show how things can go horribly wrong are useful as teaching tools. Such movies can show the way that physical spaces can be networked to erode personal freedom, autonomy, and privacy, and how that connects with, say, the Internet of Things.

Minority Report is mandatory viewing. Brazil and The Conversation are also good picks. Connecting the current problems of technology surveillance to older problems, such as the erosion of a democratic process, is valuable. So are portrayals of social cohesion in regimes where distrust and surveillance were the default. We can convey to our students and people working in various aspects of policy issues some of the feeling of dread that can happen in, for example, totalitarian surveillance structures such as those that existed in parts of the former Soviet Union. Films convey this well.

Gattaca is another movie that I find useful as a cautionary tale because it shows the intersection of genetic privacy and surveillance through technology devices. It also portrays how technology intersects with the physical spaces of the buildings, letting people go in and out based on databases that are externally processed. Those are some concrete ways to connect some of the policy issues we have been talking about today with design and the built environment and, more broadly, with questions of equality.

Daniel Susser: A theme in all your responses is that we are living through a particularly spectacular crisis moment right now. People respond to crisis in different ways. Some might argue this is not a moment to worry about things like equity, because we have issues of life and death to worry about. Others might see crisis as opportunity. Everything is being called into question: how we are navigating physical and digital spaces, how we are interacting with people, how we are dealing with travel. Many things we took for granted are being rethought. Do you think the current moment is presenting an obstacle to pursuits like design equity, design justice, and data feminism, or is it an opportunity? Are people more open to the changes that you are prescribing than they have been in the past?

Catherine D’Ignazio: For me, claims that “we cannot think about equity right now” are moot because this is a moment of life and death and the stakes are very high. Zero sum thinking is out of place. What gives me hope right now is the great number of mutual aid and grassroots organizations that emerged throughout the pandemic. People recognized that others were in need and that we must organize to help. Problems such as COVID and the murder of George Floyd laid bare that things are not all good. At the same time, I fear that we might not be able to channel the urgency created by these problems into structural change, or that we might become complacent and not push our governments to reorganize in a way that supports the flourishing of human life. When we reach out and do small things, we must also think collectively, for example, about policy.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I agree with Catherine that we are at a policy inflection moment. I think now is the time where there can be effective nudging of elected officials and to recalibrate the baselines of what was previously “impossible” to a new baseline of what needs to happen to build the world that we want live in. This is partially why I find myself increasingly talking about the grand ideas of what is progress, what is innovation, why we do not want to live in Ready Player One, to make another movie reference? So, this moment opens that opportunity. A concrete example that things have shifted is the increasing bipartisan support for some sort of recalibration of internet responsibility around content. There is consensus around the recognition that the current way things work is not sustainable going forward, and that a reconfiguration is required, where different players in the system take various responsibilities and duties upon themselves to ensure the longevity of the system. The internet is not a trustworthy place, and there are things we can do about it. Changing internet policy is wrapped up in other shifts around a fairer competition policy, around response to challenges, fairer medical access, and many other social issues we are grappling with now.

Antwi Akom: For the communities we work with, the issues we’ve touched on are life and death situations. As COVID shut down social and physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure, digital organizing, and activism became that much more important. People were really suffering and needed to find ways to get access to institutional resources and privileges. In our organization we started digital organizing, power building, and engagement labs. A lot of that centered around social and structural determinants of health, and another huge part was around elections, and how to get people mobilized on the ground, not just in a presidential election year, but for midterm and local elections. We have spent a lot of time trying to bring together these worlds that do not always speak to each other about design and policy determinants. We’ve worked to democratize data and democratize decision-making with populations that are normally locked out of these conversations. other institutional resources and privileges. That is the work that we have been doing on the ground, as part of the urgency of the situation.

The communities that we have been working with were suffering long before George Floyd. In my own presentation today, I started with the long history of those of us who have been racially profiled, killed, abused in many different ways, because I think we forget about them. We have this fifteen-minute memory after which we forget Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. These problems have been going on for a long, long time. We need to figure out how to bring the resources of the university into communities so that they can build power and self-determination through policy changes and access to

Daniel Susser: To build off of that last point, and to put these sorts of dystopian questions aside for a moment, if we want to avoid the kinds of possible futures that you all were just describing, what kinds of changes are you recommending in your various fields? I am not trying to suggest that there are magic potions and that we could fix all these systems by virtue of one or two changes, but what would help push us toward people taking more responsibility for the design choices that they are making?

Andrea Matwyshyn: One thing that I would like to see in my own community is more folks rolling up their sleeves and trying to work with policymakers. Without being in the trenches, you do not really understand how complex some of these issues can be and how they connect to other issues. We academics tend to have deep knowledge in a narrow way, while a Senate staffer might have knowledge in a broad way, because they are fielding ten different policy issues at once. is what scares me senseless in terms of politics. Imagine: it only takes a few people to make these decisions and you need the connections and the resources to be connected to those people that make those decisions. That is both the opportunity, as she described it, and the reason why so many communities and people are locked out of policies that actually work for them. I would like to flip it and say, I would love to see not people going to policymakers, but policymakers coming to the people! I mean the old-fashioned way, like really coming into the community, and being responsive to your constituency and community needs rather than the dollars that are funding your campaign. If I had that magic potion that you are talking about, Daniel, those are some of the changes that I would like to see.

I think that there is a beneficial learning exchange that happens between policy makers and regulators, and those of us in the academy who bring the different paradigms, or bring the theoretical conversation, and then the policy makers push us with the hard, practical cases. And out of those kinds of exchanges where both sides are willing to learn from each other – and that is key, because that is not always the case – magic can happen. In my experience, it really only takes two or three correctly positioned people with the correct knowledge base and the correct networks to cause magical things to happen in policy circles. But the trick is for those people to meet each other, for them to like each other, work with each other, engage in an honest way. That is hard and it is rare, but it can happen, and you have to give it a try for it to even be a possibility.

Antwi Akom: Everything that Andrea said

I would like to see us really push ourselves on how we are even using terminology; for example, community. Who is the community? What do we mean by that? Do we mean the community-based organization that sucks up all the dollars, is that really the community? Or are there 500 other mom and pop community-based organizations that do not get to be represented in those ways? I would like to see an expansion of our notion of democratization, of decision-making. I would like to see a more critical lens about how we think about community. I would like to see much more, I would like to see democracy in action and more participatory democracy and participatory budgeting and decision-making. I would love to center community voices and have a politic that is much more responsive than we currently have. That is what I would do with my magic potion.

Catherine D’Ignazio:. I think from my end, I would do all of those! I am going to bring it back to the educational environment, and to what we center in on our learning environments and what is relegated to the outside. One of the things that I would love in academia, but also in K-12 education, is more of a centering of theories and ideas of power and inequality. There are enormously visionary bodies of knowledge that are available to us.

People before us have analyzed power, race, and gender, ability, and interlocking systems of oppression. Those are the seeds of making a difference in structural issues because they give us the keys to unlock an understanding about this current moment. In my talk I mentioned how the popular press, when they cover things like algorithmic discrimination, often seem to throw up their hands and say, “Oh my, goodness gracious, the algorithm is racist!” If you have any kind of schooling in feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, or Indigenous studies, then you have tools to figure out how to change these things. But these bodies of knowledge do not get centered in our institutions and they certainly do not get centered in our design disciplines. We do not necessarily think about how we integrate visionary ideas into concrete designs, information systems, and so on. We do not need new theories, we have theory, it is called intersectional feminism. We have a bunch of other theories of that world that we could be drawing from. So, rather than new theories, we need some bridging work, and we need to center that work and bring it in and relate it to things. That is I would do as well; wave the magic wand and recenter all this stuff about data ethics back on the people who really have the ideas for how we can address the structural issues. known to us but are not known to people in the halls of power. Being that bridge to the voices that are not being heard is the thing that I try to help with. And sometimes when you are making those connections, your endorsement as an academic, who is trusted by these people, gives an entree to new groups of people to have voice in the halls of power.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I would like to add that I think one of the roles that I was trying to get at, and maybe I did not say clearly enough, is that academics can be connectors to communities that cannot get heard otherwise, and they can be translators of the theories that are well

Daniel Susser: Thanks, I was just thinking about that and about Catherine’s comments a moment ago about how to structure pedagogy. I teach in the College of Information Science and Technology and I am a philosopher by training and I work on issues around technology, ethics, and policy, and I teach these kinds of things to students. Just a few years ago, it was very difficult for me to even get students, undergraduates or graduates, to the starting point of the work that you are doing: the ethical and political ramifications that you need to consider. I would spend all semester just trying to destabilize their assumption that technologies are these value neutral things and that they do not need to worry about their implications. I have noticed a marked change, at least in my own students, over the last few years. It is now much easier to convince them of that starting point, which enables us to get into the work much more quickly. So, obviously, there have been changes in the zeitgeist that I think are really promising. I am curious about the kinds of conversations you are having with your students about these issues, about how to develop strategies for tackling them meaningfully, about how to navigate something that, especially graduate students, find very difficult, which is how to speak to different audiences. How to be someone who does academic work that needs to be legible to academics, but if they want their work to have an impact outside of academia, how to do that translation work and position themselves in that way. I am curious about how the conversations you are having with your students are going and if they have changed recently. research activity) in a medical school at UCSF, and a not-R1 at a MSI (Minority Serving Institution), at the San Francisco State University – it’s the only college of ethnic studies in the United States. Those students that are coming from the MSIs and the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), these are life and death issues for a lot of those students. Sometimes it is for my other graduate students at UCSF, but not always.

Antwi Akom: I have a joint research lab with an R1 (a research university with high

The students coming from the MSIs have usually had to go down a much harder road, and their lived experience shapes the way that they want to make social impact. So, they want to start with social impact for their auntie, for their grandma in their neighborhood that helps overcome the historical trauma, drama, and disparities that have been impacting them for generations. I have been blessed to be in a position to help these students, and my students walk that fine line between having social impact, and working in academia and being respected.

Depending on the kind of work you do, whether you do quantitative work, or qualitative work, policy work, theoretical work, it depends on your work, the respect level that you have in the academy is shifting terrain. I think the more you step outside of it, we could do a much better job of embracing this idea of making social and political impact. Making economic impact is very important to our work.

There is the possibility of impacting and changing lives, and I do not want to create a false binary. It can be a both; but, I think it is our job to help create the space for that, and those spaces are not always there. We are trying to mentor, create a safe space to be yourself, and allow students to make mistakes, grow, and learn. This will allow them to become the person that could make that social impact and have that academic impact.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I’ve noticed two shifts I’d like to talk about and then I will get to the student engagement piece. The first shift that I noticed is that when I first started teaching many years ago, there was a hearty debate over whether technology was its own thing, whether the internet was a separate space, or whether it was an extension of reality. Most of my students were originally in “the internet is its own thing” camp. I would have aggressive, well-thought-out arguments among students debating this regularly.

Now, the number of students who would argue that the internet is its own space has dwindled significantly because of how internet conduct impacts the physical world. The new trend that I have noticed is that of a contradiction in technology. On the one hand, technology can engage in high levels of curated, precise tracking of us. The contradiction is our inability to customize technology in ways that we, as users, would desire. That inherent contradiction is starting to be a little galling to my students.

The reason for the lack of customization is, of course, that it is in the interest of the company to be able to extract the maximum amount of data in ways that are maximally exploitable in terms of their licensing of data streams. But the promise of the internet, to use the happier version of that flying cars reference, was that it would give us the ability to find an obscure thing that would point us to this other obscure thing that we would also like, but that we could have some modicum of control.

I will give a physical object example. It is mystifying to me why the features in cars are so limited at this point when any internet-facing company – a car company with a website – could potentially create an interface where you check the box and create, essentially, a custom car. That level of customization, which could exist, might be more expensive and may be annoying to execute from a logistical standpoint on the company side. That degree of personalization to meet unique needs of different people, however, does not really exist robustly in the ways that I would like to see. With respect to technology, finding cars that do not phone home and inform the company where you physically are, is next to impossible at this point. The default in new cars is internet connectivity and maximum data collection, to the point where many cars now have the capability to have microphones that are turned on in the cabin to listen to your conversations.

Because we know that, for example, the remote controls that come with some cable providers have that capability and have secondary licensing streams going to relevant companies based on your comments in your living room, that is a predictable business model for what will be a next-generation car market data stream. So, where do we see the customization option that lets you turn off the internet connectivity or turn off that data collection to the point of physically disabling that microphone? We are not seeing that kind of customization opportunity, but we are seeing increasingly granular monitoring and surveillance, for lack of a better term. I think students are noticing that.

The short version of the one thing that I have been communicating to my students is that life is long, and you can have multiple different iterations of self, and multiple different careers. Some of the law students that I teach are leaving law school with significant debt, and they need to handle that. But there is always the opportunity to reinvent yourself. Just because you have a particular job at this moment, it does not mean that in four years, you cannot schedule a career change toward a job that you find more fulfilling. Giving that permission to iterate cycles of keeping yourself stable and in a good place as a human and giving back to society to recognize the needs of others is important. I think that permission to do that kind of a cycle is not something that necessarily occurs to my students, so hearing someone like me say it to them can lighten the load. There’s a tension between needing to do the responsible thing and make a lot of money. For example, some people might want to work in a less lucrative but more personally fulfilling role. And the answer is, they can do both, but sometimes that is not necessarily what occurs to them.

Daniel Susser: I want to follow up on that in a moment, but Catherine, would you like to say anything else about the pedagogical side of these issues?

Catherine D’Ignazio: Maybe because of the pandemic, I have been prioritizing creating spaces for community where people can decompress a little bit, especially in the context of the academic institution. We have a policy in the Data +

Feminism Lab that we take care of ourselves, and we take care of each other. The idea is that family and health for all of us comes before everything else. I try to model that, not always successfully, to be honest.

I also try to communicate to the students that no deadline, no paper, no research project is worth sacrificing your health and well-being. Those kinds of things can always be postponed. This summer, we had all these ambitious goals. We were going to finish drafts of two papers, and we ended up postponing one for an entire year and the other one is just there, it will happen when it happens. In the kind of high stress environment of a pandemic, I saw and heard all sorts of things through the students last year. People are living real crisis situations.

I also wanted to talk about how I am navigating these spaces. I have a luxurious situation, to a certain extent, because I am in a department that is very interdisciplinary, which makes it easier to mentor students who want to be in the tradition of the activist scholar. We do not necessarily have to “norm” students into these different models.

I do have a larger question: down the road, will that impact their job prospects? For those of us who are committed to an activist tradition, we have to figure out where we can realize those potentials within the academy. I do think it’s easier in the interdisciplinary spaces, because they are spaces that do not discipline us, and do not discipline knowledge as much. I appreciate the deep rigor of being disciplinarily focused sometimes, but then when it comes on the flip side, you are limited by very specific boundaries and never speak to other audiences. I have a problem norming students into that model, because I actually do not think it is an effective model. It’s important to find and carve out spaces academically where the scholar activist model is possible or will at least be tolerated by the department or the institution. like you mentioned, preparing people to do this work deeply within communities, as it pertains to technology and technology tools. That involves the questions that you are asking people, and how you are meeting people where they are, how you are making it easy for them to have their voice heard. To feel their own strength within the process and tap into that is critical.

Daniel Susser: We could have a whole panel about navigating interdisciplinary and disciplinary norms. I really appreciate that. Tessa, would you would like to jump in? I am sure, in the course of your work with Streetwyze, that you are engaging in pedagogy, that you are teaching people how to go out into communities and do this work, and equipping them with certain kinds of theoretical models, and so on. How does that work for you?

Tessa Cruz: Thank you – we could probably have a whole panel just on that specific question! There are a couple of different intersections with our work. One,

On the flip side, it is important to explore ways to make space for that voice to be utilized. We are helping people use community data to make better, and more community-informed, decisions. Sometimes people are passionate about that and interested, but the structure that they work within does not allow for them to do that effectively. That is a whole process in and of its own. Often we can speak to these systems that have been ingrained – as researchers, as teachers, as people in academia and beyond – when thinking about data and thinking about how much data is valid data or useful. And we try to flip that on its head, for example if we don’t have a ton of data saying one specif- ic thing, but we have one data point that is impactful and powerful that you should consider.

It’s hard for big companies to understand why they should listen to that one piece of data when they have other pieces of data saying other things. I think there are two ways of seeing it, and we specialize in helping people on the ground and within community organizations or institutions meet in the middle and understand each other a little bit better.

Doing this work takes time, it takes patience, it takes care, it takes love, it takes resources. And often we hear clients talk negatively about that. Yes, if you are working with elders and teaching them how to use technology and be at the conversation, it is going to take time. That is okay. It is really important to remind people about that and recenter their values around what that looks like in practice.

Daniel Susser: That’s such a great point.

I’d like to circle back to the issue that I raised at the beginning, which is that these questions about design – of the physical environment or the digital environment – these questions are not being posed in a vacuum. In those conversations about the ethics of design and teaching students how to become more thoughtful designers, the broader political and economic conditions that they are operating in sometimes falls away a bit. The whole burden of solving these problems can end up on the shoulders of the designers or the people who are intervening in any particular case. As a final question, I am curious as to how you all think about navigating that kind of tension. How do you prepare students, or Tessa, in your case, folks going out and working with the organization? How you help them think about and navigate both the responsibilities that they have, but also the constraints or set of options that they are operating in? A lot of the technologies that we are worried about, as Andrea was describing, are technologies that are developed and deployed by private firms and built in the context of private industry. The space that these folks are going to operate in is not one of complete freedom. How do you help people think through that tension and their own possibilities for creating change?

Andrea Matwyshyn: One of the things I try to do with my students is to use a lot of historical examples. Sometimes it is easier to see how things go wrong if you look at someone else’s time, place, and context. If you analyze a different time, place, and context with nuance, it builds the skillset to be able to analyze your own in the same way.

An example is Buckminster Fuller’s horrible, scary car. He was a genius of design in terms of geodesic domes, but his car was a nightmare. If we look at it with today’s eyes, it would be unsafe and unroadworthy in every sense of the term. We can ask how this thing was even allowed on the road. What happened to render it non-popular? What would we do if we had that kind of a situation today with, say, an autonomous vehicle? Setting up the conversation with historical examples sometimes helps to connect.

Tessa Cruz: One thing we have considered and learned, and also shared with others, is that you do not have to. When you are seeking partnerships, you do not have to partner with everyone. It is okay to find people that are mission-aligned, vision-aligned, and are on the same theoretical team. Sometimes it is tempting to work with people who you think are well-intentioned and want to improve their methods and standards regarding equity and design. They might seem like great partners in that sense, and often times those companies are really big. Still, they might not offer you the resources you want, and they might not be validating you and showing you the equity that you deserve. navigating those societal forces and trying to figure out how to do your best amidst a very fraught environment that is not perfect and will never be perfect.

A lot of what we have experienced, and try to teach students and partners, is that you do not have to partner when you are a smaller company or a smaller team. If you are a small firm or BIPOC-led, you can prioritize your values and your missions, and find people that are going to be great partners, rather than trying to partner with everyone.

I will give an example from my own work. We ran a hackathon called the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon.” Actually, we’ve run it twice now, once in 2014 and again in 2018. The first time around, it started with a focus on the breast pump, the object and the environment. There were no lactation spaces where I was working, at least not at the time I was a grad student. So, we focused on the object (the breast pump) and the experience of using the object.

Catherine D’Ignazio: I appreciate your question, Daniel, because I think about this a lot. There’s a difference between designing and making things, versus explaining things. We can wrap up a nice explanation of societal forces, and how power and oppression and privilege all work, and then we are done. But then, if you are working on making things, there is a different set of parameters. You are both

It ended up becoming a larger research project. We gathered stories from many people, and it got me to thinking about the structural issues involved in the simple act of feeding one’s child. It got me thinking a lot about things; for example, do we need better breast pumps and better lactation spaces, or do we rather need paid family leave policies because that would just solve this whole thing immediately?

I wrote a paper about that question. Ultimately, though, we need both, and we should ask for both of those things because, to a certain extent, design and making and building things can be a harm reduction strategy. As we build and organize towards long-term change, such as realizing a policy of paid family leave, we run against political headwinds. These are longer-term things that we need to work toward, but at the same time we can make shorter-term changes, reduce harm, and make more incremental improvements to people’s lives.

Maybe we train designers to think in a multi-scaled way so that we don’t think that a better breast pump is the solution to all these problems. The problems are deeply structural, and we think we can situate them and think about our own work within that larger field. In parallel, we can work on designs that can support that larger structural issue.

Daniel Susser: That is a fantastic note to end on. I want to thank all the panelists for their time today, both in the talks that you gave earlier and in this round table discussion. Thank you so much for joining us.

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