{"id":3096,"date":"2021-09-23T13:58:37","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T13:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/?p=246"},"modified":"2024-10-08T22:04:16","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T22:04:16","slug":"every-voice-heard-imagining-feminist-voice-technologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/every-voice-heard-imagining-feminist-voice-technologies\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Voice Heard: Imagining Feminist Voice Technologies"},"content":{"rendered":"

As our devices increasingly occupy our personal spaces, smart technology is poised to impact how we socialize, how we relate to one another, and how we view our bodies. How are these technologies shaping our bodies and our relationships to one another? And how can we reimagine our smart technologies to better reflect a feminist articulation of embodiment?<\/span><\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

During\u00a0 a pandemic, our technologies take on new meaning. With a disease that forces us to be distant, we\u2019ve become even more reliant on technology to mediate our relationships, how we take care of others and ourselves. <\/span><\/p>\n

Doctor\u2019s appointments occur over the internet or by telephone and people have to say goodbye via FaceTime to their loved ones languishing near death in hospitals.\u00a0 While we grapple with a daily reality that demands we think about our bodies and the bodies of those around us, we\u2019ve also been coerced into new ways of isolation.<\/p>\n

The global pandemic has raised important questions not considered until now: How do our technologies connect us to or detach us from our embodied, lived experience? Do the devices we interact with every day \u2013\u00a0Alexa, Siri, Garmin, Fitbit \u2013\u00a0support\u00a0 noticing what is happening in our bodies? Do they help us notice what is happening in our conversations and our relationships? Do they remind us to spend more time in nature? Do they alert us when our communities are in need and connect us with mutual aid networks? And finally, are these various technologies truly assistive or accessible? Or do they merely invent new methods of control?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many technologies further entrench \u2013\u00a0rather than question\u2013\u00a0already existing systems of power. For the past few years, our collective, <\/span>tendernet<\/span><\/a>, has written about and led workshops on how feminist principles can help guide new, critical conversations about technology and power. How can we reimagine our technologies so that they reflect our own values, rather than a tech company\u2019s values? In our work, we\u2019ve specifically explored how an intersectional feminist lens might help us reimagine the design of voice technologies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Technology and social power<\/span><\/h2>\n

Historically, technology has created or shaped the conditions for violence and oppression. On the most basic level, voice technologies reinforce gender norms. : The default \u201cvoice\u201d of our technologies is typically female. From early telephone operators connecting people through wired cables and switchboards, to secretaries and personal assistants, to voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Often these disembodied, helpful female voices contribute to gendered fantasies of women occupying subservient caregiver or administrative roles. Moreover, in a <\/span>2017 survey<\/span><\/a> of popular voice assistants, journalists found that when confronted with abusive, violent, or sexually explicit language, most voice assistants responded by evading the comment (\u201cLet\u2019s change the topic\u201d) or defusing the situation with humor (\u201cI\u2019d blush if I could\u201d). Such interactions suggest that Siri or Alexa, the two prominent agents of evasion, were not designed to acknowledge and confront our biases, or navigate difficult conversation, or even educate or inspire us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In many ways, this isn\u2019t a surprising development. Voice technologies have been conceived as tools to connect companies with their customers, so values like education, consent, respect, and equity are not considered as important as convenience, speed, and return on investment (ROI), which, as values, are more culturally ingrained. These priorities are reflected in <\/span>Amazon\u2019s telling documentation<\/span><\/a> for its Alexa voice assistant: users are referred to as \u201ccustomers.\u201d A company\u2019s failure to engineer alternative, more equitable values into social technologies is a symptom of bigger structural problems in the industry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These technologies re-articulate oppression, according to what is described as the <\/span>matrix of domination<\/span><\/i>,\u201d<\/span>1<\/a><\/sup> a sociological paradigm developed by Patricia Hill Collins to describe the intersection\u00a0 of power structures and forms of identity. According to the matrix of domination, people experience oppression not only through categories of identity: race, gender, disability, or class, but through the intersection of larger, structural systems, such as white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. For instance, a voice assistant\u2019s inability to parse non-American English accents might mean that, say, a Latinx woman might experience forms of oppression when she uses it, including racism, colonialism, and sexism.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"MatrixDesigns by Katrina Peterson<\/h6>\n

An intersectional feminist analysis of technology allows us to think about how multiple oppressions and regimes of power shape the way people access and use technology. It also allows us to think about how we can intervene in, disrupt, or replace these patterns by imagining feminist protocols that take their place.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prompt: How does the matrix of domination show up in other technologies? <\/span><\/p>\n

What is a feminist protocol?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Feminism is a set of practices that we enact with one another. Feminist protocols, as defined by Michelle Murphy, are \u201cstandardizable and transmissible components of feminist practices\u201d<\/span>2<\/a><\/sup> that change how things are done. These protocols take on new meaning as they move across different spaces or disciplines. Feminist protocols can take the form of small-scale, site-specific interventions. For instance, changing our speech patterns to replace abelist language is an example of a feminist protocol that can be repeated and habituated in our everyday conversations. Another example of a feminist protocol might be a voice assistant that says \u201cstop!\u201d or initiates a difficult conversation when confronted with harassing language, much like existing forms of feminist anti- harassment <\/span>interventions<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prompt: What are examples of feminist protocols you enact every day? <\/span><\/p>\n

Technology can be a site for feminist intervention. One example of this in practice is the <\/span>Feminist Principles of the Internet<\/span><\/a>, which offers a gender and sexual rights lens to technology. Drafted in 2014, the principles were developed by a global, intersectional group of feminist and human rights activists that acknowledge the internet itself can be a matrix of domination. The feminist internet movement has led to a number of interventions, including discussions about how the technical infrastructure of the internet itself \u2013\u00a0policies, standards, architecture \u2013\u00a0could be revised to reflect feminist principles.<\/span>3<\/a><\/sup> For instance, the group treats surveillance as a core feminist issue and works to hold governments and companies accountable for the dangers of non-consensual data collection.<\/span><\/p>\n

But creating sites for interrogating technology and imagining alternatives also requires new ways of thinking about and executing principles of design. As such, feminist methodologies have emerged as revisions to traditional models for prototyping and building technology. For instance, Sasha Costanza-Chock\u2019s book <\/span>Design Justice<\/span><\/i> introduces innovative ways of thinking about design through the lens of justice and equity<\/span>4<\/a><\/sup>. And\u00a0 the book, <\/span>Data Feminism<\/span><\/i>, co-authored by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein,\u00a0 explores how data scientists and technologists might integrate feminist frameworks into their work.<\/span>5<\/a><\/sup> Scholars in the emerging fields of feminist HCI, post-colonial HCI, and gender HCI, aim to offer new tools for developing more liberatory technologies. These approaches view technology through the lens of justice and social power, calling on designers and data scientists to develop more community-centered, radically inclusive, and participatory methods for building tech.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hackathons and workshops centered on intersectional feminist values and activism are two examples of these participatory methods being put into practice. Hackathons, specifically, can be powerful sites for education and learning, but they are also radical and alternative models for participatory design. Such spaces should include not only people with lived experience and expertise, but especially those communities and people who are most affected by the technology.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Globally, activists, designers, artists, and technologists are creating more participatory, inclusive sites for intervention: A <\/span>feminist hackathon to redesign the breast pump<\/span><\/a> as a way to \u201citerate feminist utopias,\u201d<\/span>6<\/a><\/sup> a series of <\/span>workshops exploring feminist data creation<\/span><\/a> for AI development, a <\/span>toolkit for envisioning transfeminist technologies<\/span><\/a> from Coding Rights in Brazil, workshops to <\/span>prototype a Feminist Alexa<\/span><\/a> in the UK, and the <\/span>FemTechNet network<\/span><\/a>, which engages in practice-based scholarship and activism. We consider our own series of workshops, <\/span>Imagining Feminist Interfaces,<\/span><\/a> both a site for empowering participants to speculate alternatives and an approach to design that takes an explicitly activist stance. These interventions may feel small when considering how deeply the matrix of domination is ingrained in our technologies. However, these interventions themselves act as feminist protocols. They transform how we think about technology as they inhabit new spaces and contexts, fueling social change.<\/span><\/p>\n

Feminism and interaction design<\/span><\/h2>\n

Our collective, <\/span>tendernet<\/span><\/a>, is a group of artists, technologists, researchers, designers, educators, and activists examining technology through an intersectional feminist framework. As part of our work, we run speculative design workshops in which we imagine technologies that embody some of <\/span>the central commitments of feminism<\/span><\/a>. In our first round of workshops held in 2019, <\/span>Imagining Feminist Interfaces,<\/span><\/a> we imagined and protoyped feminist alternatives in voice technologies.<\/span><\/p>\n

We decided to focus on interaction design in our socially-engaged practice because intervention is at the heart of both feminism and design. Feminism is a \u201cnatural ally to interaction design,\u201d writes Jill P. Dimond, because it is a tradition that \u201cstrives to address various forms of oppression in a specifically activist stance.\u201d<\/span>7<\/a><\/sup> Feminist interventions can give us insights into design and help us better understand how to shift norms and behaviors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before we can imagine what feminist technologies might look like, we need to develop a shared language for thinking about how an intersectional feminism can inform design choices and methods. In our workshops, we always begin by asking participants what feminism means to them and discussing what values they care about. As a starting point for further exploration, scholar Shaowen Bardzell\u2019s outlines six key principles of feminist interaction design<\/span>8<\/a><\/sup>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"FeministDesigns by Katrina Peterson<\/h6>\n