Postcolonial Computing

tags

Crit Tech Design

Notes on (Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Philip, K. & Grinter, R. E.: Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development 1311)

What is postcolonial computing?

move from “development” discourse to postcolonial discourse – that is, a discourse centered on the questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility in the contexts of cultural encounter

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alternative sensibility to the process of design and analysis

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projects we engage in for “others” often tell us more about ourselves

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understanding how all design research and practice is culturally located and power laden

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Difficult issues in design for the developing world

visual conventions have proven not to be universal

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processes of designing and deploying HCI4D across cultures have proven challenging as well

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proposed shifting from user-centered design to “communitization” or community-centric design

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promise of generalizability along familiar scales such as the nation-state

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analytically weak in explaining conflicts [10] and differences in technology use [12], while HCI researchers have argued that cultural “averages” are of limited use for design [24]

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“generative” view of culture

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culture is a lens

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Rather than classifying people on various cultural dimensions, a generative view of culture suggests we ask how the technological objects and knowledge practices of everyday life become meaningful

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designers to recognize their work not as designing appropriately for static, nationally-bound cultures, but instead as interventions both in conversation with and transformative of existing cultural practices

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The Problem of Development

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discourse of global, technical solutions to problems of development

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systematically avoided confronting the actions of large-scale actors such as governments and corporations as causes of the socio- economic conditions

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development regimes have historically been aligned with the interests of politically powerful commercial and capital market actors

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strategic control over the shape of projects and deployments by channeling money in ways that funders in highly industrialized countries find compelling

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Our traditional design methods are centrally concerned with the problem of making knowledge portable

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efforts in “knowledge management” by which diverse cultural understandings are to be harnessed to western techno-social practice

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Engagement

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the engagement has been shaped by scientific roles and discourses, lending authority both between researcher and model user, and between researcher and consumer of the research findings

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PD maintains roles for designers and users but calls for users to participate in the imagination and specification

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design processes less as ways that designers can formulate needs and measure outcomes, and more as shaping and staging encounters

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acknowledge users as active participants and partners rather than as passive repositories of “lore”

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recognition of an encounter as an intentional, motivated, and power-laden act

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Articulation

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Articulation abstracts the experiences of engagement and reframes them in terms amenable to design practice

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production of formal and informal representations

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representations are normally produced to move around in the world

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postcolonial perspective might point to the highly situated nature of knowledge practices

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Translation

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transformation of requirements into statements about technology or technology itself

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