In an age of virtual connectivity and increased reliance on the internet for daily functions, including by marginalized groups, can companies and technologists reframe their features or standards to support the most marginalized users’ needs? Can the modes of resilience within digital spaces from some of the most marginalized groups be listened to, learned from, and centered when creating technology? Design from the Margins (DFM), a design process that centers the most impacted and marginalized users from ideation to production, pushes the notion that not only is this something that can and must be done, but also that it is highly beneficial for all users and companies. For this to happen, consumer interest conversations need to be framed outside the “biggest use case” scenarios and United States and European Union-centrisms and refocused on the cases often left in the margins: the decentered cases. This report outlines how the DFM method can be used to build our most well-known and relied-upon technologies for decentered cases (often deemed “edge cases” which is atypical or less common use case for a product) from the beginning of the design process, rather than retrofitting them post-deployment to cater to communities with what are perceived to be extra needs.
Design From the Margins
In an age of virtual connectivity and increased reliance on the internet for daily functions, including by marginalized groups, can companies and technologists reframe their features or standards to support the most marginalized users’ needs? Can the modes of resilience within digital spaces from some of the most marginalized groups be listened to, learned from, and centered when creating technology? Design from the Margins (DFM), a design process that centers the most impacted and marginalized users from ideation to production, pushes the notion that not only is this something that can and must be done, but also that it is highly beneficial for all users and companies. For this to happen, consumer interest conversations need to be framed outside the “biggest use case” scenarios and United States and European Union-centrisms and refocused on the cases often left in the margins: the decentered cases. This report outlines how the DFM method can be used to build our most well-known and relied-upon technologies for decentered cases (often deemed “edge cases” which is atypical or less common use case for a product) from the beginning of the design process, rather than retrofitting them post-deployment to cater to communities with what are perceived to be extra needs.
Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures
We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.<br /> <br /><i>Digital Degrowth</i> is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.<br /> <br />Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.
Architecture and the Internet: Designing places in cyberspace
Cyberspace, as the information space is called, has become accessible in the past decade through the World Wide Web. And although it can only be experienced through the mediation of computers, it is quickly becoming an alternative stage for everyday economic, cultural, and other human activities. As such, there is a potential and a need to design it according to place–like principles. Making places for human inhabitation is, of course, what architects, landscape architects, and town planners have been doing in physical space for thousands of years. It is curious, therefore, that Cyberspace designers have not capitalized on the theories, experiences, and practices that have been guiding physical place–making. While most 3D environments closely mimic physical spaces, they are, by and large, devoid of the essential characteristics that differentiate a ‘place’ from mere ‘space.’ And only rarely are they sensitive to, and take advantage of, the peculiarities of Cyberspace. We believe that this state of affairs is temporary, characteristic of early adoption stages of new technologies. As the Web matures, and as it assumes more fully its role as a destination rather than as means of communication, there will be a growing need to design it according to place–making principles. By looking at physical architecture as a case study and metaphor for organizing space into meaningful places, this paper explores the possibility of organizing Cyberspace into spatial settings that not only afford social interaction, but, like physical places, also embody and express cultural values. At the same time, because Cyberspace lacks materiality, is free from physical constraints, and because it can only be ‘inhabited’ by proxy, these ‘places’ may not necessarily resemble their physical counterparts.
The De|Center | Justice, Human Rights, and Tech
The De|Center is the home of the Design from the Margins methodology. We do deep work with decentered communities to make concrete changes to technology tools that address systemic injustice and advance human rights.
Computing, Complexity and Degrowth : Systemic Considerations for Digital De-escalation
Research on digital degrowth predominantly critiques digital expansion or presents alternative digital practices. Yet, analyzing the link between digital technologies and complexity is crucial to overcome systemic obstacles hindering digital de-escalation. This article presents the different types of links between complexity and computing observed in the literature: the infrastructural complexity inherent in digital technologies, the socio-political complexity induced by them, and finally, the ontological complexity (individual’s ways of relating to their environment) hindered by digitization. The paper explores these links to identify ways to reduce infrastructural and socio-political complexities, and to move away from the reductionist paradigm, in order to support digital degrowth. Its development shows that complexity induces ratchet effects (i.e. irreversibilities in the development of a technique in a society), rendering degrowth efforts difficult to handle by individuals. Therefore, strategies to overcome these barriers are proposed, suggesting that bottom-up simplification approaches stand a greater chance of making alternatives emerge from different stakeholders (including users). This digital shift assumes the development of methods and technical tools that enable individuals to disengage from their attachments to digital habits and infrastructure, opening a substantial field of study.
Becoming the Product - Set Margins'
€24.00 In stock Becoming the Product quantity Add to cart Category: Books Tags: #designwriting, #institutionalcritique, #internetcritique Description Additional information Description In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style […]
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
About Us
Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...
issues
If the information and communications technology (ICT) industry was purposefully following a harmful agenda, these would probably be their design principles:
Appropriating Technology | Public Sphere Project — Liberating Voices Pattern Language
Dematerialization, Participatory Design, Techno-Criticism, Intermediate Technologies, Users' IT Quality Network, Wholesome Design for Wicked Problems, Labor Visions, Community Inquiry, Tactical Media
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace
Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world.The digital era promises, as did many other te
The ecosystem is moving
Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize....
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Beyond Digital Exhaust: Reclaiming Agency in the Context Economy - A MozFest Discussion on Personal Context Infrastructure and the Future of AI
At this year's MozFest in Barcelona, we convened an urgent conversation about what may be the defining struggle of our digital future: who will control the vast
"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.
