Designing for Defiance: Antagonistic Activist ICTs

This week’s blog post focuses on the paper “Illegitimate Civic Participation: Supporting Community Activists on the Ground” by Asad and Le Dantec (2015). This paper delves into the world of activism and explores the ways in which ICT can facilitate and support civic action that works against, rather than within, formal political and institutional systems.

The paper begins by outlining the various forms of digital direct democracy and civic participation; each bringing with them a different set of challenges for designers in HCI.  Firstly, the authors highlight participatory democracy; promoting civic engagement, education and debate directly with political officials, rather than through representatives or intermediary organisations (take for example a Change.org e-petition). The primary concern here being one of access, specifically access to information, so as to assemble a collective informed citizenry. Drawing from this, plebiscitary democracy seeks to amplify the voice of this collective and ensure representation in decision making. Finally, libertarian democracy moves beyond such e-democracy and instead reflects a distrust of institutions and encourages autonomy among and discourse between citizens (online forums etc).

Recent political events both at home and across the pond, regardless of how you view them, in many ways illustrate and embody these concepts. For many, a vote for Brexit or a vote for Trump was less a statement of political alignment with specific party politics, but instead represented wider anti-establishment sentiments and public discourses of citizen power and discontent with the current democratic processes on offer. In many ways, the act of voting moved beyond a mode of participation and instead became an act of defiance; an activist statement specifically intended to “upset the system”.

In discussing the current application of ICTs for participation, the authors highlight numerous ways in which technology can and has facilitated things such as efficient organisational management, knowledge production, neighbourhood empowerment (See Andrea Grimes Parker‘s work) and new sources of data analysis to connect citizens to city departments (see Cycle Atlanta or Ian’s work). However, they suggest that such uses are bound by the mechanisms of our current democratic system, leaving a gap in systems or technologies that support alternative visions of democracy.

The authors engaged in ethnographic observations with Occupy Our Homes Atlanta, a smaller activist group that emerged from the wider Occupy Movement. Through observing the tactics of this activist organisation, Asad and Le Dantec identified several practices that offer potential spaces for ICT design. Activism by nature relies on flexibility, spontaneity and speed of response. It often seeks to be antagonistic so as to draw attention to issues or injustices that are otherwise hidden (offering a potential space for the application of intentionally provocative, ambiguous design for activism that invokes reflection and interpretation). On the ground, activism frequently employs non-violent direct action tactics such as protests, sit-ins and the reclaiming of public spaces. In terms of ICT more specifically, the authors identify three distinct sets of practices that activist organisations engage in:

Situating – deliberately revealing hidden information (Anonymous is a classic example of this)

Codification – the tailoring of communication to different audiences so as to recruit/persuade most efficiently

Scaffolding – harnessing momentum of allies and supporters and allowing for non-physical participation (you could argue that “slacktivism” fits into this category – where liking or sharing represents solidarity without direct participation)

 

The paper ends on a discussion of the limitations of applying a common problem-solving, outcome-oriented design paradigm to the context of activist ICT; the “ad hoc”, fluid and intersectional nature of activism more generally does not lend itself to such design. Instead, the authors suggest, the value of process and uncertainty should be exploited rather than designed away. This no doubt creates challenges for evaluation of design, however, as is the intention of the paper, this poses a new question: even if measuring relative “success” of activist technologies is possible (a matter open for debate in itself), is it desirable?

Experience in Design

In last week’s session we explored experience-centred design. In order to explain the framework set out by Gronvall et al. in “Causing Commotion with a Shape-changing Bench – Experiencing Shape-Changing Interfaces in Use”, we picked on poor Tom and drew from elements of ambiguous design and wearables to utterly confuse him. Taking inspiration from a previous design artefact created by Shichao (a pair of bunny ears that moved in response to the wearer’s heart rate), we fashioned a rather attractive set of paper bunny ears and attached them to Tom’s head. Through re-enacting this responsive wearable technology, we asked him to reflect upon his feelings throughout the experience and used this to demonstrate the multiple forms of sense-making expressed within Gronvall’s paper. We witnessed him anticipating, connecting, interpreting, exploring, reflecting and appropriating the technology in this interaction. We only hope that he went on to demonstrate recounting later that day, when his wife asked what he’d done at work today…