Designing for Voice: Access, Autonomy, and Justification Questions in Designing Computing Technologies with Marginalized Communities

Ishtiaque Ahmed
University of Toronto

March 19, 2021
The benefits of computing are often confined within the populations with certain privileges. Those benefits rarely reach billions of underprivileged lives around the world fighting extreme poverty, illiteracy, gender discrimination, forced migration, and various other exploitations and marginalization. The services that are available through computing often fail to address their needs and constraints. My research with various marginalized communities in the Indian subcontinent over the last twelve years has revealed how this failure is often associated with some of the core issues of computing, including access, autonomy, and justification. In this talk, I will explain these three topics by describing three projects that I have been working on, each of which involves ethnography and design work with marginalized communities in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Canada. My talk will focus on how access to computing becomes limited by the imposition of colonial perspectives, how autonomy over a digital platform is curtailed by discriminatory standards, and how computing technologies often silence local voices by using western scientific rationalities. In this talk, I will further demonstrate how my design research explores possible ways to strengthen the voice of marginalized communities by focusing on local values, participation, and pluralism.

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