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Participatory Design scholars and practitioners have embraced speculative design approaches to challenge normative assumptions about sociotechnical futures and address the systemic lack of racial and class diversity in futuring. This paper draws upon a community-based participatory speculative design (PSD) project conducted with a group of working-class Detroiters, focusing on speculating about alternative community economies. We illustrate how PSD served as a process of ongoing “contamination” where the boundaries of community members’ visions of desired futures are opened up, troubled, and negotiated on the individual, alliance, and collective levels, thus forming new commons for collaboration and resistance across differences. For them, such contamination was a reflexive process aimed at identifying whose visions were excluded from their own and how community-held sociotechnical imaginary could emerge through collaboration. We argue that foregrounding contamination in PSD makes meaningful space for fostering reflexivity in knowledge production, while destabilizing and reassembling more inclusive sociotechnical futures.
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Eliciting Alternative Economic Futures with Working-Class Detroiters: Centering Afrofuturism in Speculative Design
Economic crises such as the global recession and financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, have elevated new forms of economic cooperation. Supporting efforts in finding alternatives to capitalism requires understanding the role of design in imagining alternative economic futures and reaching those most harmed by current capitalistic models. Through a collaboration between a community organization in Detroit and a team of university researchers, we hosted and facilitated a five-week workshop series with Black and Brown working-class Detroiters where they collectively imagined alternative economic futures using speculative design. They proposed Community Capitalism, Childcare Collectives, and Village-Based Childcare as alternative economy concepts from the workshops and described their unique characteristics and traits of love, care, and inclusion. Aligning with generative justice frameworks, Detroiters prioritized sustainable families and communities. We contribute an understanding of technology’s role in the imagined economic futures, a discussion of what this means for community-involved governance, and a push for centering Afrofuturism in speculative design approaches to foster futures literacy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1352915
- PAR ID:
- 10451900
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 957 to 977
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596011
