Cultural Content – Design Justice and Museum Justice
Florence Okoye talks through what Design Justice is and how GLAMs can apply it
Morning Team Content,
Regular readers might remember a post we ran a few months ago from Kelly Forbes, Museums Galleries Scotland about planning a website redevelopment with inclusivity at its heart.
This post speaks to similar themes. Florence Okoye is Senior UX designer at the Natural History Museum. She’s interested in collaborating with communities to inclusively design digital experiences and infrastructure. Most of her research focuses on intersection between science communication and opening access to STEM with critical and decolonial approaches to design.
Over to Florence…
There are lots of considerations to doing digital design within the heritage and culture sector.
Helpfully there are lots of frameworks from the more experimental and critical (the Oracle for Transfeminist technologies) to those created within the public sector, for the public sector (GDS’ Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility). These are key given the role for GLAM organisations to be community centred organisations, but also doing that in a way that maximises often quite limited resources!
But in a world of algorithmic racism and surveillance capitalism, automated policing of racially marginalised and working class communities, right wing radicalisation etc, there’s more to digital than the technical. That equally applies to the way digital is planned and designed in museums as well. One approach to join the list of helpful frameworks is the Design Justice framework.
What is Design Justice?
A really great starter is the text ‘Design Justice’ by Sasha Costanza-Chock, which is available for free on the MIT website.
To use a quote from the Design Justice network website, design justice focuses on:
‘…how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.’
It was developed out of workshops held at the Detroit based Allied Media Conference in 2015. The workshops looked at creating a collective definition of ‘design justice’ as something different to more familiar topics such as accessibility or inclusive design. The discussions wanted to go beyond ‘design with good intentions’ which, to quote the Design Justice principles zine, often:
‘…can perpetuate the systems and structures that give rise to the need for design interventions in the first place’
Design Justice’s 10 principles
There are 10 principles to the framework. These are:
We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.*
We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.
Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
Design Justice is a way of thinking about how we connect the important conversations about our ways of working. Whilst digital is fantastic for enabling things to happen at scale, from a GLAM perspective, Design Justice provides an opportunity to ensure that digital has the same ethical considerations as many other aspects of organisational practice.
After all, how used are we to evaluating museum digital as also subject to considerations like those promoted by ICOM (which takes care to explicitly define ethical guidelines for various aspects of Museum working, which notably includes income generation, exhibition interpretation and community collaboration).
How to apply it
Generally when I apply these principles, the 10 framework points can be expressed by thinking about the following:
Who [materially] benefits?
Who is harmed?
Who is missed out?
These can be used as conversation starters for a project or a new feature. The responses to these questions can be incorporated into our personas, archetypes, user journeys and service maps; they can inform the questions we ask in our surveys and interviews; the kind of signals we look out for in our observations and data analysis.
Example of applying Design Justice in GLAM UX service design work
For example, at a recent design jam, this was a useful process to refine the requirements for a prototype public sector service.
Thinking about who benefits didn’t only help us to think about the context that someone would use the service, but it also helped us be intentional about which users we want to ‘own’ the service, continually contribute to it, and how that functionality could be built into the service.
Thinking about who might be harmed ensured we thought about embedding security against right wing bad actors, and the question of who gets missed out led to discussions about the pressures faced by local authorities. This in turn highlighted the importance of community ownership.
You can see the documentation of the project.
To quote LaTanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski, Museums are not neutral and neither (to quote technologists like Stephanie Hare) is technology. As many like Legacy Russell, Shoshana Zuboff, Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini etc. have amply demonstrated, technology is perfectly capable of reifying and exacerbating harm; for those of us doing digital in museums, that also includes the institutionalised inequities of our sector, however unintentional.
There are many doing great, community centred digital design across our sector. By challenging ourselves with any of the 10 principles, all of us - data experts, developers, digitisers, solution architects, experience designers etc. - can enable ourselves to make more inclusive, empowering and just experiences.
If you’re interested in joining the Design Justice for Heritage and Culture working group, sign up.
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