Reading Response for Week 4
Racializing surveillance and dark sousveillance are the two main themes of Browne’s article. It is interesting and also inspiring for me to see how surveillance, as well as the development of its related technologies, can be contextualized into a racializing history, which is often invisible in current mainstream discourse. “Racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place.’ . . . my use of the term ‘racializing surveillance’ signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance (p. 16).” This is a long quote, but I believe it summarizes the basic argument of this introduction article. Duarte shares a same perspective with Browne. She argues for intersectional feminist approaches in interface studies. She proposes the study of prismatic interfaces, “interfaces that through intersectional analysis reveal the social, economic, and political impacts of interfaces and associated assemblages for raced and gendered social groups.”
I always believe that humans shape technologies as technologies shape humans/human societies, and therefore I totally agree with Duarte and Browne that it is crucial to look at technologies (and their related concepts) from the perspective of (the constitution of) social hierarchies and social groups. In addition, examining how technologies help to make these social hierarchies invisible and social groups marginalized is even more important for us to understand both historical and current human society (especially when states start to make use of cutting-edge technologies, such as facial recognition). FemTechNeT is just one example to visualize of the invisible power relations and social groups. According to their manifesto, they “recognize digital and other technologies can both subvert and reinscribe oppressive relations of power [e.g., sousveillance] and [they] work to make these complex relations of power transparent.” Technologies not only reflect, but also have the potential to subvert the current social hierarchies – hence I believe that to a very large extent the technology can be, and is, “a power tool” (just as FemTechNet).
Nielsen stresses the importance of the user in the construction of engaging personas. The article argues that “personas and scenarios are tightly interlinked with storytelling to evoke empathy and identification.” Focusing on empathy and identification helps designers “to engage in the user and to focus the design on the user” by reducing, if not eliminating, the influence of designers’ stereotypical images of the users. “To create an engaging persona is to provide the reader with a vivid description of a user, so vivid that the reader can identify with the user throughout the design process.” Here, what do “the reader” and “the user” refer to? I understand “a vivid description of a user” as “a persona description,” but I am not sure whether “the reader” refers to a particular group of people (the target users) or in a most general sense, anybody who reads the scenario. This is important because I believe that any persona, no matter how “scientifically” they are drawn from data collection, is an artificial, collective and to some extent abstract image – it consists of random (although deliberately chosen) and discrete elements, which are disassembled and selected from various images of real individuals. In other words, the very action of the construction of persona descriptions is subjective, and although the process model covers two steps related to the user, the design process is still under large control of designers. Hence, I am more attracted by one future direction of the persona method mentioned by Nielsen: participatory design and co-design. I believe that because the process of summarization and representation is always subjective and biased it may be helpful to involve as many users as possible in the design process. For example, designers can send out questionnaires to collect what different users expect in this new design project and who are particularly interested in it – instead of looking at data collection and analyzing the data on their own. Also, users can participate actively in the whole design process. “Personas as part of role-playing scenarios with users” is one form of this active participation, and I believe that users engaging with this form of persona building (if no other method can replace the persona one) should be as many as possible because everyone is unique, and designers often unconsciously overlook certain crucial aspects, such as the gendered and racialized boundaries pointed out by Duarte and Browne (particularly if designers are mostly white male people).