Content warnings

I’ll take some time to cover content warnings. I ask that if you have personal and traumatic experiences of these topic that you consider what you might need to help keep you safe as you listen and make the precautions you might need during this intro section of the talk. These topics can be difficult to listen to without intimate experience and they can affect us all in different ways. I primarily am interested in your safety, comfort and well being as we talk about difficult topics and our relationship to them as technologists.

This talk contains the following subjects: Violence against partner/domestic violence, mental health, suicide, terrorism, guns, political violence, natural disasters, missing people, PTSD. COVID-19.

Power dynamics between citizens of countries formerly colonised, racism, education/social status prejudice.

There may also be mentions of other topics that some may find distressing. As I said before, please take care of yourself as you listen, take breaks if you need to or turn off audio.

Some slides have ‘No photos please’. Please do not share, make copies of of take photos of these slides. This is to protect the, content or people mentioned or shown in these images.

Human rights centred designer? What does that mean?

So, I’m a human rights centred designer, what does that mean?

You may have heard of the term human centred designer, where the designers of tools, software and experiences aim to centre the ‘human’ in their work, this doesn’t mean that the technology goals or business goals are ignored, but rather centres the humans, the people, in what they use and need ensures that the right choices are being made for them as the ‘primary’ reason that that technology is created and useful.

Because after all, the people that use these technologies, these tools we make are the forward momentum defining what is created, and that creation must be useful and valid for them.

Human rights centred design differs in a way where we not only consider the needs of people that will use and experience what we create, but their known and unknown human rights within these interactions with technology.

A reasonably quick example of this could be around privacy. Say you’ve created a tool that has a feature where people can have location enabled and stored within the tool. Most people, we assume know their own needs around location well enough and are competent enough with tools generally that if we make options for security of that location data accessible that the people that use it will choose the privacy configuration that work for them.

This example already makes a lot of assumptions, primarily that the people know what the risks to their safety are more widely. In the same example, consider someone who’s identity is criminalised (we could look to LGBT+ communities here) and we could begin to think about what they might need, to protect their rights and safety that are not part of our simple assumed story.

I began to think more in this way during my time at an organisation called Ushahidi.

Ushahidi

Ushahidi is a Kenyan NGO that makes humanitarian, Open Source Software technology for human rights.

Founded in 2008 in the aftermath of election turmoil in Kenya Ushahidi’s mission and subject matter expertise is in building varied communication technology to empower people to raise their voices while delivering tools to help organisations better listen and respond to those people raising their voices.

Ushahidi platform is most commonly used for disaster response, election monitoring and human rights abuse reporting.

To describe what is visible on the screen right now is a screenshot of ‘Quake map’ showing a report of a hospital being destroyed during the Nepal Earthquakes. and a small graphic showing that 700 medical response helicopters were deployed by the Nepalese army from this Open Source collected citizen information.

There’s also an example of Ushahidi’s emergency communication tool TenFour, which was created after the Westgate Mall terrorist attacks in Nairobi in order to aggregate communications in crisis situations.

While at Ushahidi as a designer I worked across projects building and improving the OSS tech for cases like how to improve access to healthcare and reduce HIV/AIDS in adolescent girls and young women, build resilience through mutual aid and community support in crisis and disasters and improve peace building and education across communities in East Africa.

Designing for human rights

With the efforts that I’ve made to centre human rights in my professional and personal life you might think that it’s easy to integrate and advocate. It’s not, it’s difficult due to multiple factors, but the pressure of design and tech to sideline human rights as a focus is one of the hardest parts.

This snippet is from a conversation between myself and Kat Lo, who is Content Moderation Lead and UX at Meedan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinelo/) and fellow human rights centred designer. We were speaking about how we struggle to not prioritise human rights in our work.

The snippet reads: “After designing for some of the most extreme human rights circumstances, it became extremely difficult if not impossible to not centre human rights our design approach.”

I worked as a designer for a parental tech start up. A customer support case came in.

In 2017 was working as a designer shortly before joining Ushahidi, in a ‘tech for parents’ start up. They made a useful product and had a good mission to help parents and kids better talk about the time spent on devices and curb ‘screen addiction’.

I had asked during my interview and wondered in my first few weeks whether the young people being monitored and limited through their devices always truly consented and how that power was exercised by a parent.

I asked ‘Has there ever been a case of abuse? where a parent has stopped a kid seeking information that they should have rights to?’

I thought about myself as a younger teen, which was before the internet was throughly used by parents generations, i was finding information about LGBT+ issues and discovering an identity that was mine, to internally to explore and wondered, would I have been stopped from viewing that?

I was assured there were policies and considerations being taken and I was placated.

Then a customer support request came through a friend of a woman was asking how to remove the app because their friend’s partner was using it to monitor, track and control their device and communication. The team was asked, what should we do? How should we respond? what was our responsibility here?

There was quiet kind of panic, one that happens when something you’d hoped to never face arises. These kinds of problems are ones that keep you awake at night thinking what if?

We talked as a team, how do we address this? Some were more involved than others, citing company policy of ‘only she (the abused partner) can request the removal of the software with his (the abuser partners) consent. So the friend asking on the abused woman’s behalf was not in a great place to support her abused friend. Can we delete the accounts, can we block them? Lots of ideas on how to ‘solve’.

I spoke up, as a person who had experience of partner abuse and said, doing any action to rouse suspicion for the abuser could put the woman in more danger and we can’t know what might happen if we suddenly remove the tool of control. We need to support the friend and woman to get to a safe situation before doing anything that could result in violence. I worked with the customer support rep, to find the closest charity organisation that could ensure safety before any technology solutions could be attempted.

Was this enough? we’ll never be sure and while I attempted to have conversations afterwards about safe guarding others the issue was largely ignored as an anomaly an ‘Edge case’.

The amount of OSS projects that have human rights focuses is growing and access to help these with design contributions is a great opportunity.

I want to address the definition of OSS in a humanitarian and ‘for good’ context because this can get fuzzy. The amount of OSS projects that have human rights focuses is growing and access to help these with design contributions is a great opportunity.

However, I believe, that by the virtue of being open, many open source projects not ‘directly human rights focussed’ are still doing ‘for good’ work and I consider most OSS as work towards human rights or ‘for good’ purposes. I’m aware that there are likely projects actively working against these ‘for good’ aims that are still ‘open source’ which is why I say most and not ‘all’.

I want to tell two more stories from OSS projects where I’ve been able to slowly introduce human rights centred design in our work.

Panic button. As we spoke, the excitement about this feature was huge…I was quiet. I was thinking of times I’d felt panic…

Back in 2018 was attending a team ‘sprint’ where we’d travelled to a location to work on our OSS projects feature roadmap and plans for the coming year. I was reasonably new to the team and we had good relationships with foundations of respect.

However, like many tech teams, we often got excited and carried away when discussing features and improvements to our technology. We were working on a crisis communication app where people can send and receive messages in dire situations like terrorist attacks, natural disasters and similar events.

We we gathered around a table and I was stood off to the side, In groups I tend to be quieter, contemplative, listen and absorb information.

The particular feature we were talking about was being referred to as ‘panic button’. The idea made sense, a way for people in these dire, dangerous situations to more easily send messages to contacts. But when we started to draw and sketch ideas we started to envisage this large red button filling phone screen that said ‘panic’…

The team were excitedly talking about how it could function ‘And the user will just tap this big panic button and a message will be sent here and here and the configuration of it can operate in this way…’

A thought occurred to me suddenly, ‘What kind of person would hate to see me push that big red screen filling button?’ ‘What if I was in a hostage situation and needed to be more subtle?’ That reminded me of how people who are in situations of control might need to send subtle, careful messages to stay safe. How can this still help the person who needs help, but be discreet in certain situations? What if this actually hurt someone rather than helped them?

I gently stopped the energetic conversation and explained the case of someone that might need to be more discreet with their ‘panic button’ need and that a panic button isn’t inherently a bad idea but executed poorly could harm as much as it helped. Could we then, consider this under multiple circumstances and how might we make sure those that need subtlety are cared for. I used the two examples that came to mind, a hostage situation and a domestic violence situation. One of these I had more experience with than the other though I knew what it was like to be held in a single space through threat of violence.

The team were quiet for several seconds, the excited energy calmed and felt uneasy for a moment. Until the team processed the examples, began to consider this approach and we were guided back to a space that allowed excitement but with added care for the complexities of the humans we were building for and all the aspects that may be unknown to us.

Mapping a violent crisis. In order to attempt to collaboratively prototype solutions, we needed to understand each others experiences…

On to our second story, Often designers are asked to work with those that use the tools we create, through research and participatory approaches we learn and experience what our users go through in order to better represent and advocate their needs. Though often these processes touch upon deeply personal topics.

I was working on a project with a large and varied team around the role of technology in peace building and peace education. The goal, was to better understand and build tools that helped those advocating for peace in societies and communities that faced violence and crisis.

In the research part of this project we were asked to do a number of design activities one of which was journey mapping. Where, with users you map the events, actions, thoughts and feelings of a time period. You may have seen or participated in these before. The main difference here was we needed to understand what happened during a violent incident to better prepare technology tools for those incidents.

The idea of journey mapping what was essentially, peoples trauma didn’t sit well with me and I had not come across methods and processes to properly care for people whose experiences could still be harming them now but i knew the typical method would not be sufficient.

I spent a lot of time with my two closest workmates on a way of meeting the needs of the project while introducing care and ethics into the exercise. I used my own understanding of traumatic experiences to consider an adapted approach.

At this point I’d like to introduce Polycom Women.

facebook.com/polycomdevelopmentproject

Polycom women are a group of women across many generations and backgrounds dedicated to peace building in Kibera (informal settlement or ‘slum’ in Nairobi, Kenya). They undertake a number of different peace building activities in their area including peaceful protests, skills growth and speaking to and engaging with youth on multiple difficult topics.

Working with Polycom and the other attendees at these workshops about peace was one of the first times I was confronted with my own experience of trauma as well as other peoples and how to manage that in a design research context for technology.

We met Polycom women before our workshop journey mapping exercises, and I remember how casually these women spoke of being harmed as the peacefully protested and attempted to continue their peace building work.

It was at this point I knew that building tools and process for people that have and are traumatised, means better understanding your own perspective on trauma and experiences of trauma.

Before our activities, I went through the same exercises I would be asking people to do for us and, as I asked them to detail their experiences I first shared mine with them.

Activity - Journey Mapping

We’re going to move into a guided journey mapping activity. Journey maps are powerful activities that you can keep for your own use or if you feel happy to, shared with those you work alongside or even made open.

I’m going to ask you to think of a deeply upsetting event in your life and, like with the previous stories participants we’ll begin to journey map this event.

Doing this activity is optional and not advised if you are still affected by this event and would need recovery after revisiting the subject matter during this activity. Instead you can listen to my examples and follow along.

For those listening and not participating, there will be pauses of silence while I offer time for those participating to write, reflect and work with their material.

What will nudge you to centre human rights in your work?

Will it be people suffering with illnesses like covid-19 unable to access information about infection risk?

Will it be people who reach out on social media platforms to speak about institutional violence and cruelty?

Will it be those that reach out to you when the tech you’ve helped build has allowed for private files to be leaked?

What about when someone is tracked, monitored and judged for something that they cannot and should not change. Like who they love, what they believe in or how they look.

What if any or all of these were people you know and love? what if these happened to you?

It’s well and good to say you believe in and support human rights and it’s great when folks take that outside their work and roles into protests, policy, advocacy and charity. But why not where we spend much of our lives, our workplaces and tech communities where we make useful tools. You might think of the risks, the worry, the concern for your own stability and peace. But when so much is at stake for everyone, the steps you make to being more human rights focused the more the risks will become normalised and we’ll begin to make human rights centred in our tools.