Gathering: Community-Driven, Culturally Sustaining Design of Emerging Technologies

• In Event: The Role of Emergent Technologies in Equitable Futures: Navigating Between Entrenched Injustices and Expansive Possibilities

Abstract

Innovating with emerging computational technologies – themselves representational artifacts that indiscriminately model the phenomena they encode (Agre, 1997; Martens & Smith, 2020) – requires acknowledging how these technologies are instantiations of cultural systems that privilege particular ways of being and knowing in the world. Further, these technologies perpetuate systemic oppression; a problem that even industry leaders such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft cannot yet resolve (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; O’Neil, 2017). Exploring educational innovations with these technologies without critically understanding the potential historical and cultural damage they can cause risks further disenfranchising minoritized communities. Issues of (mis)representation and lack of representation of minoritized groups not only shape the underlying computational models driving educational “innovation” but also the design processes to build these models, which have both caused deep harm to these groups; particularly Indigenous communities, with whom we work.
We argue that the perpetuation of technological disparities is rooted in (mis)representation and lack of representation of Indigenous culture, education, and computation. Present forms of emerging technology do not support or engage Indigenous ways of being and knowing, which can inhibit Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty (Litts et al., 2021). In fact, many of the historic and current forms of emerging technologies harm, silence, and further traumatize Indigenous peoples; thus, scholars push for “technological self-determination and sovereignty” (Winter & Boudreau, 2018). Hence, we posit that who designs inherently determines the cultural process of design, which “blackbloxes” or keeps invisible many of the design decisions. Digitally-centered design processes common in computer science can be difficult for designers to explain and for others to interpret, which can privilege who is able to contribute to the design (Rudin, 2019; Resnick et al., 2000). Hence, the need for equitable and interpretable (Rudin, 2019) pathways to participation in the design process remains significant.
It is within this intellectual, cultural, historical, ethical, and political context that our team is working to discover and develop design processes that weave together rhetorical and technological sovereignty. We share our work toward developing the concept of gathering as a design process that invites physical prototyping as an important practice in developing culturally sustaining technologies. Gathering is inspired by “Hui,” an ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Hawaiian language word translated as: to band together, assemble, organize. Gathering shifts the agency and responsibility of opening up pathways or allowing for participation away from the designers to the collective team. Put simply, gathering is not about the designer or researcher pushing to gather, but about the collective team opting into coming together.
In this presentation, we share four characteristics of gathering as real, relational, rhythmic, and generative, and we demonstrate how gathering is a pathway toward rhetorical and technological sovereignty. Through coming together, gathering addresses the need to make transparent the blackboxing of technology, especially the underlying models and design decisions shaping technology. Our work has implications for how we design new forms of technology toward more equitable futures, especially by making visible decision making and sensemaking that occurs throughout the design process.

Authors

• Breanne K. Litts, Utah State University

• Melissa Tehee, Utah State University

• J. Kaleo Alladin, Braiding Knowledge

• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, University of Utah