Week 1

Thursday class:

Ready steady activity:

• Benefits:
  • Convenience for students + filtering opportunities
  • Help students utilize resources
  • Convenience for stanford to simplify student body into numbers
• Questions
  • How does STEADY measure student responsibility
  • Is the ranking system necessary?
  • What is the definition of “successful alumni”
  • 25 years ago how diverse was the student body?
• Data types + rules:
  • Food purchases - healthier food options facored
  • Location
  • Cardinal $ use - less money spending is favored
  • Major - bias to stem
  • Green life participation - green like participation favored
  • Building access - academic setting favored
• Not collected
  • Grades/ classes
  • Other clubs and communities
  • Income background
  • Skills/ jobs experience
  • Socioeconomic background
  • Student preferences
  • FLI status
• Debrief
  • How did alumni data affect this?
    • Tech historically and majority stem majors
    • Historically more legacy and students from wealthier families
    • Holds current students to these criteria
    • Ex: amazon trying to hire women in managerial positions using their data
      • Heavily biased data reinforced inequalities
  • Should this system exist?
    • Data is invading privacy
    • Students should be able to represent themselves - they have no agency to identify themselves in the way they want
    • There are important pieces of context that is not on the card
    • This may shift student behavior
• Blackmirror clip
  • Not bureaucratic
  • Does not take context into consideration
• Identity journal
  • Who are you in this design work
  • How do you identify yourself
  • How might you want it to grow in your beliefs and values
• How might we redesign the STEADY system to support students?
  • System architecture
  • Criteria
  • Data collection
  • Implications

Readings

Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock: Design Values - Hardcoding Liberation?

• Design justice, grounded in critiques developed by the disability justice movement, asks us to question the universalizing assumption that there is only one configuration of the human motor system. Instead, there are many configurations; some will be privileged (supported) by a vertical bar as a mechanism to pull a door, and others will find that particular combination of object and action difficult.
• Most designers today do not intend to systematically exclude marginalized groups of people. However power inequalities as instantiated in the affordances and disaffordances of sociotechnical systems may be intentional or unintentional, and the consequences may be relatively small, or they may be quite significant.
• Through a design justice lens, we might say more specifically that under neoliberal multicultural capitalism, most of the time designers unintentionally reproduce the matrix of domination.

10 Ways Designers Can Support Social Justice"

1. Define a set of principles by which you will work
2. Distance yourself from those who work against your principles