Design by F. Okoye

As someone who is passionate about Black history and actually putting my skills to the benefit of the community, when a stakeholder proposed creating a microsite to host images and stories from a selection of the archive, I had to say yes. 

After all, online archives are one of my biggest passions when it comes to doing digital for museums and heritage. There are so many deep, interconnected problems and so much that is needed to make them truly accessible and usable for people that it’s the kind of thing a critical service designer like myself just leaps at the opportunity to start tinkering with.

When our team was approached to work on an interactive for a touring exhibition, Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep, I was very excited. This was an opportunity to try out more user involved design research techniques, and for a problem close to my heart… Science communication!

My role

For this project, I worked was the design lead, working with the exhibition interpretation team to ensure the product was meeting core educational goals, tested prototypes with Museum visitors and designed the interface.

The goals of the project were:

To give the supervisors real-time update about the progress of an incident (e.g. gas explosion)

To give the field operatives a means of quickly sharing their status, completing whatever sub-processes were required in a safe, timely and efficient way.

My role 

I facilitated workshops with engineers, dashboard managers and stakeholders to improve the architecture, layout and data provided in the design.

As part of Mozfest 2019, I attended a session in the Openness space called ‘Using IoT to Measure Outdoor Air Quality in Africa’. The session was going to be led by Warukira Theuri who wasn’t able to make it* (for reasons I learned later which I’ll add a note about below).

There were about a dozen of us gathered so in the spirit of Mozfest... we kind of put our own session together on the topic.

This post is to document what was discussed. I take no credit for the topic, and advise anyone interested to follow/contact Warukira who is clearly an amazingly talented and smart young woman.

The session was facilitated using techniques I’ve picked up through my design jam facilitation days. The basic steps are:

Check in - a quick round of introductions for people to say their name, who they are and what they hope to get out of the session

Ideation - individually, everyone has 10 minutes to write down their thoughts on the topic. These could be challenges, questions or general comments

Clustering - what themes arise from people’s notes?

Discussion - normally in a design jam we would want to format the themes into ‘how might we?’ statements to help frame the future prototyping and research.

Discussion part 2 - taking the role of the critic, what are the questions, new provocations, criticisms we can think of?

Ideation - based on the themes that have been identified, what could help address these issues?

Check out - we swap contacts/social media handles and say ‘til next time!’

What themes came up?

As a group we noticed our thoughts and questions could be divided into a couple of core themes:

What standards do we build IoT products to?

Should we look to EU standards?

Questions were raised around ipv6 and general security of devices

Are there lessons from environmental tech for protecting and monitoring endangered wildlife for privacy paradigms? e.g. rhino tracking

How can we ensure quality of data created by IoT devices?

Does it match with quality of other public data assets?

What is the right hardware?

How do we learn to make the hardware?

Are there IoT devices that can boost wireless strength (to help deal with issue of lack of connectivity in rural areas)

Are there any accessible courses to learn how to program for IoT?

A diagram of our ideas mapping can be found here: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U_OVPPGElw0b3F4T0cLANYlDUDEyuFu68nQDxPtqrNA/edit?usp=sharing

Some provocations...

“OK, the air sucks - now what?”

This connected to question about how one turns data into action. Reporting that pollution levels have changed is one thing but is that enough to convince local councils? Is there a social/political organising aspect to support community tech?

Who else is doing this around the world - can we work in solidarity?

What are models of successful activism [informed by data obtained from open source IoT]

IoT will collect data for AI. Where does the responsibility lie?

Any good resources?

We ended the session by sharing potential resources that could help us all address these questions. The resources range from regulatory, to service design practice, to people working on similar projects facing similar obstacles (one thing that came up was that actually the dynamics of local politics and access are very similar whether in East Africa or Western Europe!).

Here is the list we put together:

Papers and research

Global information society watch 2018: Community networks

Community networks: the internet by the people, for the people

Designing Connected Products

Community centred tech

Luftdaten (Berlin)

Internet Society

Afrinic

Web Foundation

Women’s Rights online research

Design

This is Service Design Doing

Decolonising Design

Global Design Jam community

Campaigning

Friends of the Earth, Scotland - FYI, there are global networks so find your nearest one!

Regulatory

European Environmental Agency

Data

52 North wiki - specifically work on specific project called “sensor web”

SOME FURTHER COMMENTS

At a later conversation, I learned that the reason Warukira wasn’t able to make it was due to the “usual” UK government hostile environment idiocy which messed up her visa application.

I intend to write about this in a bit more depth but as someone who has attended Mozfest before and tends to hang out a lot with the folks attending from Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, this isn’t unusual. However, what struck me was the attitude of ‘us’, us in a collective sense meaning the hosts, the volunteers etc etc.

To me, the spirit of Mozfest should also be about solidarity as much as it is about people having fun, ‘just getting involved’ and having a can-do DIY attitude. Maybe it would have put the organisers into too much trouble with the authorities, but honestly, I wish more of us attendees and fellow facilitators could also have known about all the amazing people who weren’t able to make it because of the UK governments despicable policies, so that at least we - as the Mozilla family - can show our support and solidarity.

Now as I said, this happens every year and honestly at this rate will keep on happening - it will probably even get worse, so long as the conference remains in Europe, which it will. In the meantime, what those of us with relative privilege can do is to call it out, let our governments and local councillors know that we know what’s going on and that this is NOT OK. As a community, we should be explicitly talking about the fact that our fellow civic technologists are being unfairly treated due to neo-colonial nonsense. At the very least, this repeated issue with visa applications is an important lesson for the younger generation of technologists and academics in countries like the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, the US, Canada; in countries that are only at the top of the pile because of centuries of colonialism and occupation, to demonstrate why we cannot imagine technology is somehow in an ivory tower that will never be affected by politics.

I’ll stop there because I’m working on a proper article about it, especially now my initial fury has eased so I can talk a bit more thoughtfully about this.

A webcomic for the Natural History Museum… it’s live!

Very pleased to say that our first webcomic for the Natural History Museum is on the website.

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Service Design in Heritage day 1

See, I’m getting better at this insta-documenting lark!

Today was the first iteration of Service Design in [Arts, Culture &] Heritage workshop(s), held at the Barbican Arts Centre in the Life Rewired Hub. Borne out of some great conversations with Kristen Alfaro about common difficulties with designing holistic, inclusive services when working in a Cultural institution – be it a museum, an art…

The Wilberforce Society Annual Conference: On Ubiquitous Junk and Infinite Reflections

I was invited to speak as part of the Wilberforce Society annual conference titled ‘Brave New World: Reimagined’, focussing on questions around the technological landscape of the future and the implications for policy and legislation.

My talk was part of a panel called ‘The White Heat of Technology’. Although I discuss the Internet of Things, I’m more interested in how our approaches to designing…

Bulgaria Web Summit 2018: Understanding the Job to Design the Service

…which turned into ”Designing for the Job in a Noisy World”.

I’m usually very professional!

Bulgaria Web Summitwas one of the best conferences I have ever spoken at and actually the first where I learned to have faith in my instincts. The initial idea I had for the talk was to go into the Jobs to be done framework and how any tech product – from an app to an API – needs to be framed as a service…

UXCamp Brighton 2018: Co-Creating UX for Interesting times

I love barcamps and unconferences and I wish there were more of them for designers. When I saw UXCamp Brighton come up on a list of meetups and conferences, I pretty much signed up on the spot!

They’re actually one of the things I love most about the maker community – unconferences (combined with sturdy code of conducts!) are so intrinsically democratic, if you’ll excuse my theory hat it just…

Speculative Design: Afrofuturist and Indigenous projections symposium, London: Designing for a Black Futurity

JSConfEU 2018: Hey you, do you even design?

I still can’t get over that this actually happened. JSConf EU has a very special place in my heart as it was the ultimate conference for me when I first got into tech. Even though I’m more on the design side than the coding side, I still watch their videos and follow the twitter devotedly as they have not only the best roster of speakers ever, they are serious about creating a tech ecosystem that…

Building without bias – digital technology and architecture for the post-binary: In the shadows of hateful glass

Wednesday I was at the Building centre as part of their ‘Building without bias‘ event, chaired by Vanessa Norwood and curated by Hannah Rozenburg whose research and practice explored methods of tackling and subverting gender bias in architecture.

The production of architectural space in the digital age is increasingly reliant on automated technologies which infer that data is truth. But this…

Birmingham Design Festival part 1: It was never about learning how to code

Birmingham Design Festival arrived with a thud, even with sensibly opting to take the time off! Heading off to the Steamhouse for my talk, I was incredibly excited – this is the first BDF after all, and I’d never been to Steamhouse so…

…unfortunately I was incredibly ill, beset with hayfever which left me with chest pains from sneezing so much it was that bad.

  Description

Just when balance is…

Spread awareness about using ethical frameworks to better understand the requirements needs of all actors working in a system to ensure ethical design practice

Add to learnings about difficulties faced by designers to work in an ethical manner

Description

With a wide array of platforms and connected services, varying user needs and business priorities, how can we navigate tech innovation, business requirements and user needs to create services of value that are solution focussed yet sustainable and don’t compromise security, user data or ethics?

This workshop will be set up as a design jam where we will explore the common pain points and barriers to inclusive and ethical design we might experience in our day-to-day jobs, ultimately creating a prototype framework for ethical design practice that can be adapted for (almost!) any project.

  Set up

The session started with an open discussion of ethical issues that designers face. I think the most pertinent one was simply a question ‘What even are ethics?’ How designers need to feed back into the training system is definitely a question for the design community.

The rest of the workshop followed the outline here:

Inclusive Design

We ran out of time a little at the end, but at least some people were in a place where they could present back to all the participants.

Outcomes

Some of the issues raised by designers – particularly through their storyboard – included:

Not being able to test with or learn from the right people

particularly when new requirements come in which also need to be tested for inclusivity and accessibility

timelines are not adjustable to meet new requirements

Projects being done on basis of budget rather than human needs

comes up in light of government cuts to local councils

Learnings

This was more of a challenge to facilitate than previous sessions, mostly because I did that thing I tend to do where i give more than one task at a time! I think also because of time pressures I did too much steering rather than facilitating which led to some people getting offended by certain phrases or statements I’d use offhand without setting up the context (e.g. ‘Safe Space’).

Some of the outputs indicated different ways of understanding ‘values’ – someone mentioned ‘Efficiency’ in theirs which makes sense but isn’t what I would initially think of as an ethical virtue. There really is no time to get into it in an hour or an hour and a half, but for longer sessions, would probably be good to check in throughout the process about how we’ve come to understand particular values as ‘ethical’ in the context we’re working in.

References?

Inclusive Design Practice

For Mozfest 2018, I decided to go a little deeper on the topic of smart cities. The first workshop I ever facilitated there had been on the topic of pervasive computing which has many intersections with smart cities but now I wanted to explore some of the outcomes a bit further.

I am still a bit obsessed with this whole question of approaches to designing complex systems and design jams allow me to explore that. Plus it means I get to better understand the issues that come up with collaborative approaches instead of… just lecturing people.

  Description

The session will be structured as a design jam where participants go through the user centred creation process to prototype features for (or even an entire) smart city which puts intersectionality at the heart of its digital and physical architecture.

Combining methods inspired by critical design and community centred practice and traditional Igbo masquerade (mmanwu) performance, we will start by ideating based on not only issues but also existing solutions we see in our own contexts, then perform light ethnography amongst fellow Mozfest attendees and the local community before getting down to prototyping our solutions through cardboard, code and post-its!

Following an iterative design and test process, we will end up with prototypes of a human+environment centred smart city.

  Outcomes

There is always something cool that happens with a design jam. As a method I’m always aware of and trying to mitigate their accessibility limitations, and its the range of amazing things that come out which encourages me to make them as easy as possible to do for everyone.

One of the really in depth outcomes was this prototype of a self sustaining living unit, the idea being that these would be the units of a truly just smart city because one of the things that’s needed to be self-sustaining is… community. The goal here isn’t to encourage people to sequester themselves away, but instead to design to enable people to share their goods as they might wish to.

There were lots of other outcomes which I’ll go into in more depth. I think the best way of approaching this is to combine learnings from all these type of workshops into some systems maps and a prototyping strategy that can be interrogated further.

  Thoughts

I’ve pretty much made it my mission to attend every single Mozfest in some capacity. Whether as volunteer or workshop facilitator, you will definitely find me there having a blast, half-attending as many sessions as I possibly can and eagerly taking notes.

Now some caveats – I will be the first to say that the setup is hideously unaccessible. if you have autism, find crowds too much are physically disabled… yes getting around and understanding the space is flat out unpleasant. I am fairly neurotypical and there have been times where I just don’t do anything because it’s too much. Part of why I want to volunteer is to do my part in making it just a bit more manageable for folks.

Another reason is to keep advocating for Mozfest to go to Africa. Every year it’s predominantly African speakers who have issues getting visas to come to the UK, when we know it’s so much easier for UK/American speakers to go to Africa. A distributed Mozfest would be a great challenge for Mozilla to live up to its name on creating a web that is for everyone.

Anyway

STIR magazine launch: Of countermemories and recursive futurities

I was invited to speak at the launch of STIR magazine’s new edition on the 14th. It was great getting to chat interesting stuff with folk doing some fantastic stuff in the area of speculative design, history of tech and critical approaches.

Below is the transcript of my talk.

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Museum Engagement as Speculative Design Symposium Proposal conference: Considering futurities beyond the anthropocene through decolonising narratives of natural history collections

Description

The natural history museum provides a unique opportunity to engage people with concepts that are intrinsically associated with commonly depicted futurities in the realm of science fiction and critical design. As a field, natural history is able to demonstrate that the planet we inhabit has been an alien world more than once in its past and will most likely be so again in its future.