Speculative Blackness: Considering Afrofuturism in the Creation of Inclusive Speculative Design Probes

Eff the ineffable: on the uncommunicability of a conceptually simple contribution to HCI methodology

“…In Bray and Harrington's [6] work on Afrofuturism, in which they used card methods for participatory speculation in Black and brown communities, they explained: "Participatory design is positioned as an approach to address community challenges and reimagine potential futures by decentralizing systems of power and centering the marginalized, moving away from designers as experts and framing design as being community-driven. Methods of speculative participatory design are useful in imagining futures among marginalized groups while negotiating existing societal constructs.…”

“…And someone else can ask: how do you know that the PDFi is what got those results? 6 And that question is impossible to answer. I can point to projects that are similar in spirit [43] and say: if someone did the same experiment without PDFi, it would look something like this.…”

Knitting Access: Exploring Stateful Textiles with People with Disabilities

“…These experiential encounters are important for exploring how technology can ft meaningfully into people's lives. Our probes are speculative probes [4] which combine the investigative engagement of design probes [17] and the imaginative predictions of speculative design [13,40]. In addition, our textile swatches, in their intriguing materiality and graspable transformability, ofer a means of involving non-experts in envisioning future self-tracking technology and practices that have personal value.…”

More than a Modern Day Green Book: Exploring the Online Community of Black Twitter

“…Incorporating Afrofuturism as part of a design process is a means of "importing more diverse perspectives to inform the design of more inclusive future technological solutions" [109]. Researchers have combined Afrofuturism with participatory speculative design to yield future visions and technologies that center the concerns and hopes rooted in the experiences of Black people [9,51,106]. With Black speculative fiction and particularly Afrofuturism as fodder for design probes alongside incorporating participatory design with Black people, researchers, designers, and technologists can engage this population to envision new online communities and other technologies.…”