Liberatory Poetics
Speculative Thoughts on Liberation as a Design Principle
Ngozi Harrison
This is a collection of interconnected/interdependent loosely structured thoughts on liberation as a design principle. These thoughts don't necessarily put any novel ideas forward or purport to give an actionable plan, but instead seek to hover around the topic, discerning its contours and edges.
If we think of design as world-making how might we liberate it from a capitalist paradigm? How might we build new worlds and new liberatory technologies? We have to extend [or reframe?] the idea of technology and even our idea of “progress” because so much of it is informed by consumption and a colonialist framework. What is a liberatory technology? The phrase liberatory technology is one I borrow from Murray Bookchin, who explored these ideas back in the 70s in his book Post Scarcity Anarchism.
So many systems and much of the startup industrial complex has the thin veneer of being revolutionary or increasing access but in reality, it is gradually expanding the reach of big tech as a surveillance apparatus and acts as a hegemonic gatekeeper to culture and information. When I use the phrase startup industrial complex, this does not simply refer to your friend's startup idea but a complex interconnected web of Institutional investors, VCs, Accelerators, Universities, and eager founders hoping to build the next unicorn.
The goal being pursued here is not ideological purity but, how can we get rid of the idea of innovation for innovation’s sake and reorient the ideas of design towards justice and liberation? To pursue that suggests that there is something worth redeeming in the domain of design and design thinking. So what is worth redeeming, and how can we extend existing frameworks?
Recently, there has been much critique of tech and design from many different disciplines and perspectives. Many great activists, scholars, hackers, and designers have been at the forefront of calling out the insidious ways inequity is reproduced or the slow march forward of our dystopian future. However, what I have not seen as much is literature and work on what paths forward look like. I think the critique is very important, especially because we often have a false idea that innovation and progress are something that shouldn’t be questioned.
Three key areas need increasing focus to do this work of new world-building and orient the tools of design and technology toward justice. These are critique, new frameworks, heuristics and theories, and practice.
A Critique of Tech Solutionism
Tech solutionism is the idea that all problems simply boil down to a technology problem. Essentially having a hammer and hitting every nail possible with it. Every year theaters a new buzzword or popular technology that becomes that hammer. Big data, web3, future of work, etc are a few examples. Often times it is design frameworks and methodologies that guide the development and implementations of these technologies that serve a role of bolstering and legitimizing these projects. That’s why it is important to move upstream and critique the frameworks themselves to reorient towards justice and liberation. Instead of making better products or selling existing products, how do we make better worlds?
How do we differentiate between cultivation and planning
I want to juxtapose two different approaches and put forward the idea of cultivation as the approach that is needed in this era where more and more we have tools of computability but the world becomes hard to calculate/comprehend while machines continue to do so.
We can think of changing the world as an exercise in predicting and seeking to map out the world and systemize it. How then does this connect to understandings of spatiality and the overview POV represented by GIS systems which have become pervasive from Google maps to drone technology. Ultimately, when we are speaking of changing the world we are speaking of planning. When we speak of planning we are speaking of the architect, all going back to the concept of the great architect, the orchestrator of the universe. The position of the architect is one that is removed from the spatio-temporal plane of the handiwork. It is top-down, looking upon the thing that is being created. This removed view can be shown to be exactly the kind of ideological framework that is pervasive in design as evidenced in what has been observed as tech-solutionism. A position of hubris that attempts to
We can compare this with a Glissant's poetics of Relation that which situates us with the idea of unpredictability and of relation as being in a position of change and exchange. An ontology that derives meaning from relation. In order to be in relation and observe relation one must shift from this overview archon/architect position to one that is within. The idea of the cultivator is the concept that I would like to contrast this with. Cultivator is a word that is chosen specifically for its organic connotation. Embracing this organic perspective is not about leaning into a biological analogy per se, but much more about the stochastic and emerging nature of that which exists in the organic form. Cultivation builds the house from within so to speak, instead of planning from the outside. It works within what exists and encourages along providing care to the roots, responding to stimuli, and allowing for evolution and growth.
Thinking of Liberation as a Multiplicity
what I am interested in are notions of relation, network, connectedness, space, heterogeneity, and emergent capabilities of the assemblage. In this age of the internet where space and time have collapsed, revolutions no longer have leaders, and the hegemony of neoliberalism has taken on an atmospheric quality, where is the space for liberation? We too long have tried to design top-down solutions, grand plans for justice, and the idea of bringing on a new world that we have forgotten liberation is a multiplicity.
We have to move away from the idea of utopia as a singularity and even the need for universal solutions to an embracing of diversity. When I say diversity I don't mean in the neoliberal corporatized sense but diversity grounded in difference, heterogeneity, and opacity. We need a generative multiplicity of utopias, not a singular project.
Diversity is a recursive property
Each culture in Relation has a relation to its internal components and is irreducible to essential components. Cultures also have a relationship of exteriority with the Other.
In this way, diversity is recursive, both in the space of difference with the other and space of difference with each component of the whole. Various cultures are in more or less degrees of realizing this fact and this can be seen as existing on the spectrum of colonizing western societies as seeing themselves as a totalizing project and metrics against which every other culture must be measured and the society in the motion of Creolization which is explicitly expressing its internal diversity and place in the chaos-monde
Discoverability vs Wayfinding
Instead of building platforms based on algorithmic discoverability can we engender new, exciting, and empathetic processes of wayfinding? Algorithmic discoverability tells us its purpose is to show more of what we want but in actuality, it is a process by which users create the raw data material which when collected as assemblage is used to create an ecosystem, targeting engine, and market for ads. Wayfinding is actually discouraged making it hard to explore without the "smart" algorithm suggesting things to you promoting echo chambers. You can search, but that is not the only form of traversing digital spaces. In this case, wayfinding refers to exposing the underlying information architecture of the library of content to allow for a traversable interface. Alternatives methods of traversing include tags, breadcrumbs, browsing user-generated lists of content, and much more experimental methods.
This probably exists as a sort of spectrum where tik tok exists on one side and Wikipedia exists on another.
Liberating Design as a Discipline
A key aspect of designing for liberation is liberating design itself. Design is held captive by our overemphasis or professionalization but we must shift to a diffusion of and democratization of our understanding of design. Everyone is a designer.
The creation of new heuristics, methodologies, theories, and practice is imperative to create guidance to influence the industry and practitioners. The dichotomy of builder and user is one that ultimately does a disservice because it can create an extractionary perspective and problematic chasm between the ones building and the end user. Co-creation and coliberation are important principles that should guide work that seeks to build community value and justice. An example of a heuristic that needs to be unseated and ultimately replaced is the phrase oft-repeated in Silicon Valley “move fast and break things.”
How might we design liberatory technologies
If we think of design as world-making how might we liberate it from a capitalist paradigm? How might we build new worlds and new liberatory technologies? We have to extend [or reframe?] the idea of technology and even our idea of “progress” because so much of it is informed by consumption and a colonialist framework. What is a liberatory technology? The phrase liberatory technology is one I borrow from Murray Bookchin, who explored these ideas back in the 70s in his book Post Scarcity Anarchism.
So many systems and much of the startup industrial complex has the thin veneer of being revolutionary or increasing access but in reality, it is gradually expanding the reach of big tech as a surveillance apparatus and acts as a hegemonic gatekeeper to culture and information. When I use the phrase startup industrial complex, this does not simply refer to your friend's startup idea but a complex interconnected web of Institutional investors, VCs, Accelerators, Universities, and eager founders hoping to build the next unicorn.
The goal being pursued here is not ideological purity but, how can we get rid of the idea of innovation for innovation’s sake and reorient the ideas of design towards justice and liberation? To pursue that suggests that there is something worth redeeming in the domain of design and design thinking. So what is worth redeeming, and how can we extend existing frameworks?
Recently, there has been much critique of tech and design from many different disciplines and perspectives. Many great activists, scholars, hackers, and designers have been at the forefront of calling out the insidious ways inequity is reproduced or the slow march forward of our dystopian future. However, what I have not seen as much is literature and work on what paths forward look like. I think the critique is very important, especially because we often have a false idea that innovation and progress are something that shouldn’t be questioned.
Three key areas need increasing focus to do this work of new world-building and orient the tools of design and technology toward justice. These are critique, new frameworks, heuristics and theories, and practice.
A Critique of Tech Solutionism
Tech solutionism is the idea that all problems simply boil down to a technology problem. Essentially having a hammer and hitting every nail possible with it. Every year theaters a new buzzword or popular technology that becomes that hammer. Big data, web3, future of work, etc are a few examples. Often times it is design frameworks and methodologies that guide the development and implementations of these technologies that serve a role of bolstering and legitimizing these projects. That’s why it is important to move upstream and critique the frameworks themselves to reorient towards justice and liberation. Instead of making better products or selling existing products, how do we make better worlds?
How do we differentiate between cultivation and planning
I want to juxtapose two different approaches and put forward the idea of cultivation as the approach that is needed in this era where more and more we have tools of computability but the world becomes hard to calculate/comprehend while machines continue to do so. We can think of changing the world as an exercise in predicting and seeking to map out the world and systemize it. How then does this connect to understandings of spatiality and the overview POV represented by GIS systems which have become pervasive from Google maps to drone technology. Ultimately, when we are speaking of changing the world we are speaking of planning. When we speak of planning we are speaking of the architect, all going back to the concept of the great architect, the orchestrator of the universe. The position of the architect is one that is removed from the spatio-temporal plane of the handiwork. It is top-down, looking upon the thing that is being created. This removed view can be shown to be exactly the kind of ideological framework that is pervasive in design as evidenced in what has been observed as tech-solutionism. A position of hubris that attempts to
We can compare this with a Glissant's poetics of Relation that which situates us with the idea of unpredictability and of relation as being in a position of change and exchange. An ontology that derives meaning from relation. In order to be in relation and observe relation one must shift from this overview archon/architect position to one that is within. The idea of the cultivator is the concept that I would like to contrast this with. Cultivator is a word that is chosen specifically for its organic connotation. Embracing this organic perspective is not about leaning into a biological analogy per se, but much more about the stochastic and emerging nature of that which exists in the organic form. Cultivation builds the house from within so to speak, instead of planning from the outside. It works within what exists and encourages along providing care to the roots, responding to stimuli, and allowing for evolution and growth.
Thinking of Liberation as a Multiplicity
what I am interested in are notions of relation, network, connectedness, space, heterogeneity, and emergent capabilities of the assemblage. In this age of the internet where space and time have collapsed, revolutions no longer have leaders, and the hegemony of neoliberalism has taken on an atmospheric quality, where is the space for liberation? We too long have tried to design top-down solutions, grand plans for justice, and the idea of bringing on a new world that we have forgotten liberation is a multiplicity.We have to move away from the idea of utopia as a singularity and even the need for universal solutions to an embracing of diversity. When I say diversity I don't mean in the neoliberal corporatized sense but diversity grounded in difference, heterogeneity, and opacity. We need a generative multiplicity of utopias, not a singular project.
Diversity is a recursive property
Each culture in Relation has a relation to its internal components and is irreducible to essential components. Cultures also have a relationship of exteriority with the Other.In this way, diversity is recursive, both in the space of difference with the other and space of difference with each component of the whole. Various cultures are in more or less degrees of realizing this fact and this can be seen as existing on the spectrum of colonizing western societies as seeing themselves as a totalizing project and metrics against which every other culture must be measured and the society in the motion of Creolization which is explicitly expressing its internal diversity and place in the chaos-monde
Discoverability vs Wayfinding
Instead of building platforms based on algorithmic discoverability can we engender new, exciting, and empathetic processes of wayfinding? Algorithmic discoverability tells us its purpose is to show more of what we want but in actuality, it is a process by which users create the raw data material which when collected as assemblage is used to create an ecosystem, targeting engine, and market for ads. Wayfinding is actually discouraged making it hard to explore without the "smart" algorithm suggesting things to you promoting echo chambers. You can search, but that is not the only form of traversing digital spaces. In this case, wayfinding refers to exposing the underlying information architecture of the library of content to allow for a traversable interface. Alternatives methods of traversing include tags, breadcrumbs, browsing user-generated lists of content, and much more experimental methods.This probably exists as a sort of spectrum where tik tok exists on one side and Wikipedia exists on another.