Designing Against the Status Quo

摘要

Recognizing the importance of artifacts for shaping politics and possibilities, we hope to leverage design's close alignment with production and progress to find our way to the table and showcase the alternative worlds that could be possible. Even if we do not yet have perfect (or complete) methods for ensuring that design brings about more progressive and just futures, we cannot continue forging ahead with the world as it is. As we improvise and iterate on our practices, a series of questions help us to maintain an orientation that rebuffs and resists the world as it already is: 1. Whose status quo? What should be destabilized? 2. What's at stake? Now, what else? 3. Who gives permission? Who disagrees? According to whom? Who else? 4. What makes a good change? How does (can) change happen? 5. What is my positionality, power, potential leverage? 6. How can we overcome inertia, dislodge the sediment of history? 7. What are the limits of design? Like method cards or inspiration toolkits, these questions and provocations can be called upon at many points within a design practice to remind us of the human stakes of our work and the alternative futures that may yet be possible. Our workshop concluded with a renewed commitment to exploring alternatives. We call on the broader HCI community to join us.