Review of Design Through Inversion

Recommended decision: Accept with minor revision

This paper uses two design workshops held in feminist hackerspaces as cases to illustrate how principles growing out of critical/feminist literature on design can be used to intervene in the design of technologies and other infrastructures by feminists. The paper advocates for the use of an “inversion” technique in feminist (re)design projects, while pointing out some of the challenges that beset the project of feminist intervention in design. Overall, the paper is written clearly and appears highly relevant to readers interested in peer production and feminist (un)hacking practices. It shows great promise and can be fully realized with some (relatively minor) revision with respect to the points offered below.

This review is written from the perspective of a reader expert in feminist theory, activism, and methodology, but largely unfamiliar with the literature underpinning this study. Many of these comments are thus directed at changes to the piece that could help similar readers understand the principles at the foundation of the paper and connect the insights discovered in this research to larger issues in feminism.

Infrastructure and inversion

One of the major contributions of the paper appears to be its emphasis on infrastructure and the promise of infrastructural inversions in the (feminism-informed) design process. I’d like to see more broad reflections on this. For instance, when you discuss your examples, can you reflect more broadly on the ramifications for highlighting infrastructure and infrastructural inversions?
While you hit upon these ideas in the specific examples discussed, I would welcome a deeper overall discussion of the broader lessons you derived from explicitly problematizing infrastructure for the workshop participants. Not being familiar with the concept before reading this paper, I’d also appreciate just one additional sentence in the first or second paragraph explaining what an “infrastructural inversion” is. Not having seen the examples yet, I had trouble intuiting what was meant in the second paragraph when the authors say they will “show how the process of inversion begins to suggest a different set of goals…”

Method/ology

While I understand space is limited, I would like to see some discussion of method and methodology. The article does not describe how/why interviews were conducted or with whom, and it does not explain what “action research” is and why it is useful. Further, some discussion of how the method/ology itself is informed by feminism seems relevant. At minimum, citations of methodological literature for the reader would be helpful. There are several points throughout the paper where further methodological explanation could be inserted to good effect. Some examples:

When you discuss your approach in designing your workshops, you say that you moved away from the approach of Dunne and Raby and toward an infrastructural focus. Could you review here what that initial approach was and why you felt it necessary to shift focus? A sentence or two would suffice.In your section Operating an Infrastructural Inversion, can you clarify that this paper is about a shift in your research agenda, from observation to intervention? Why did you, as feminist researchers, feel motivated to augment observation with intervention? These things are probably obvious to you but I think it would be helpful for other scholars to
understand why your research took this form. When you talk about the invitation that prompted you to take up an interventionist position perhaps you can just go a bit further and describe in a few sentences your process of deciding to accept the invitation?

When presenting the design activities you facilitated at the first workshop, it would be helpful to explain the reasoning behind these activities and what you hoped to achieve with them. This would help the reader understand how your activities build on the literature you so ably reviewed at the beginning of the paper. I appreciated your discussion of the changes you made to the workshop from the first to the second event – it helped to illuminate why you decided to structure it in the particular ways you did. This was what I felt was missing from the description of the first workshop’s structure.

Feminist standpoint

It would also be helpful for the reader to be presented with some information as to how the authors define and understand feminism, as this would help illuminate what motivated the authors to plan their workshops and what outcomes they hoped to achieve. For instance, the authors seem to hold a preference for radical critique of existing systems/structures—the authors express disappointment when the examples generated by participants aren’t radical—but it’s not explained why this is a desirable value and why feminist hacking should hold this as its aim.

Further, this implicit stance by the authors seems to introduce a normative, evaluative goal for the paper: to evaluate whether the strategy adopted in these workshops was successful at achieving a particular kind of feminist aim held by the researchers. This could be at odds with the more neutrally-positioned empirical goal implied in the introduction: seeing what results when particular framings of design/hacking are provided for participants. I don’t have an objection to the authors having a stance and using it to inform their work (indeed, feminist theory would tell us they must) but I think it would be more honest to say, “here’s how we define feminism and here are the feminist ends we hoped to achieve with our participants, and here are the ways in which our tactics succeeded and failed along these lines.”

Related to this point about presenting your own political position vis a vis feminism, the paragraph in which you present a reading of the Danielle Steel group’s re-design could be made more helpful for the reader. Here you are judging your participants as non-reflexive and anti-feminist, without telling the reader the criteria for such judgment or justifying those criteria. Why is “reinscribing boundaries” a problem? Why is “othering” an anti-feminist move? Why was the group’s ultimate solution unsatisfactory to you? Does this reveal anything about the limitations of the interventionist method you utilized in the workshop? By explaining how the group violated certain principles of feminist design, you can help guide the reader toward an understanding of those principles and what they exist to ensure (from your standpoint). Further, you can enable readers to evaluate the evidence you present in support of your analysis and come to their own conclusion about it.

Organization

In organizing the second (empirical/analytical) part of the paper, I believe it would be helpful to identify some key analytical points you wish to make about the results of the activities and use these to frame your discussion, rather than going through each example one by one (chronologically?) and leaving the reader to aggregate your observations and critiques into analytical takeaways. I think you have these analytical points in mind already (and they do come through in isolated spots, such as when you show how I-methodology emerged in the Tinder example) but as a reader I felt I was doing too much work to try to figure out where each example fit in the scheme of your analysis. Organizing the paper around analytical insights would also set you up better for your conclusion – the reader would already have started to be convinced of what your cases illuminate about feminist design processes in general. I like your conclusion that puts the reader face to face with the inherent challenge in “feminist” design – the multiplicity of feminism itself. This is one example of an analytical point I’d like to see explained earlier in the paper and then supported with the examples, rather than saving this summary of the problem for the conclusion.

The literature review (paragraphs 1-7 of the Feminism and Design section) is great; it’s clearly written, draws together many related feminist concerns regarding design and infrastructure, and implicitly communicates to the reader how the authors are defining feminism and its concerns (though as mentioned above, I’d welcome explicitness on this point). The eighth paragraph – where the authors transition from the literature to how it informed the design of their own workshops – became slightly less clear. Again, I was still not precisely sure what Bowker and Star’s notion of “inversion” entailed. I felt the latter part of paragraph 8 could be reserved for a bit later in the paper when the authors lay out how they designed their workshops, at which point I would want to see a fuller explanation of Bowker and Star’s methodological themes and how they informed the workshops, along with how the authors perceived these themes to be in
affinity with feminist critiques/intervention.

The observations you made of the physical layout of feminist hackerspaces (paragraph 4 of the “Operating…” section) would be helpful earlier on in the paper (just a few paragraphs sooner), when you are explaining what these spaces are and what concerns participants bring to them. While the observations clearly grew out of your holding the workshops in these spaces, they make a broader point that distracts a bit from your laying out of the workshop designs in this section.

I found the final paragraph confusing. You introduce an idea here – human-centered accounts of technology development – that you wish for your paper to counter. I would suggest introducing and critiquing it much earlier since it seems central to your conclusion in this study. This would also give you an opportunity to explain why you desired to run interventionist workshops and what you hoped would result (points I asked for above). Having explained this earlier, you could then use the conclusion to make the provocative observation that, in a way, you and your participants failed to “dissolve dominant logics,” and that this might indicate something larger about the persisting tension between the “human-centered problem oriented” and feminist perspectives.

Review: Design through Inversion

In this revision, the authors have done some important work in clarifying infrastructural inversion and reorganizing the paper around analytic insights. Yet upon reading the revised manuscript, I stand by my initial assessment that more methodological discussion is needed. I also feel that the analysis portions of the paper could be strengthened.

Overall, I also feel clarification is needed on the aims of the article (this in addition to the aims of the workshops themselves). Do the authors seek merely to describe emergent phenomena that you observed at the intersection of feminist design and hacking? Are they interrogating the utility of infrastructural inversion as a technique for eliciting feminist resistance? Are they analyzing and hopefully theorizing the tensions among different feminisms within design/hacking spaces? All are potential contributions of this paper but I would want to see them concretely articulated as such. Without a clear statement of aims, I’m can’t be convinced that the authors have successfully achieved any of them, which calls into question whether this piece makes a significant enough contribution to merit publication.

My impression from reading the manuscript is that the central contribution of this piece is methodological: the authors are hoping to make the argument that by staging workshops that introduce a feminist design perspective (incorporating infrastructural inversion) to feminist hackerspaces, important tensions can be productively revealed and analyzed. If I am indeed correct in gleaning this as the major purpose of the project, then much more discussion of the epistemological justifications for the workshops is necessary. The article must include a methodological discussion that outlines not only how the workshops were conducted but also the ways in which the researchers planned to generate new knowledge through these workshops and critical discussion of the extent to which that knowledge was generated, i.e. what research questions were the authors able to answer as a result of conducting these workshops. I do think there is some discussion of answers in the conclusion, but these should really be framing the whole piece so that the reader can understand how the description and analysis presented build toward an argument.

The place the authors address these concerns best is on page 6. Here I appreciated the discussion of how the first workshop came about and some of the reasons for structuring it as they did. An illuminating discussion from the first draft – of the changes made to the second workshop – seems to have gone missing in this version. Bringing that back would help.

The penultimate paragraph gets at the purpose of the workshops from the point of view of the researchers, which is good. Yet I found the second half of the paragraph confusing – more time should be taken to discuss the contribution here. I also felt that the conclusions reached by the authors – that the workshops showed how feminist framings helped shape people’s ways of knowing and that they revealed the co-constitutive relationships between feminism and design – were not supported enough by the analysis presented in the paper. More needs to be written in the analysis sections to convince the reader that these conclusions were proven by the research.

I am also still hungry for discussion of the researchers’ own position in relation to this project. Reading between the lines it seems as if they are feminist designers (or scholars of feminist design) who wish to see the feminist design discourse productively interfaced with the current trend of feminist hacking, and are thus motivated to stage workshops like those described in the paper. But this isn’t explicitly stated in the piece. An explicit discussion of the researchers’ position would also help to show the reader why these workshops were held, what was useful about holding them in feminist hackerspaces specifically, and what was learnable from observing dynamics in these spaces.

The reorganization around analytic themes is a real improvement. However this organization isn’t set up for the reader so it’s still a bit hard to follow how the sections of the paper build its argument. Transitions between themes would help too. I also found myself questioning what/where the analysis was in the “Gender Binary” and “Standards and Classification” sections and how that analysis was contributing to a larger argument. I wasn’t always clear in each section on what the significance of the observations/findings there was. An exception was the final paragraph of the “Reifying” section. Here I was able to see what the takeaways were from the researchers’ intervention. But again, I would have liked some discussion of how the planning/design/execution/context of the workshop itself enabled the productive discussions the authors document.

Relatedly, the final paragraph of the conclusion brings up interesting issues around the limitations of the researcher’s interventionist method. Yet the reader doesn’t have enough information about how the workshops were conceived/framed/structured to assess how those factors might have contributed to the issues identified by the authors. With more discussion along these lines, the piece would make a greater methodological contribution for scholars hoping to do similar work in the future.

Other questions

Is some discussion missing in the second paragraph of page 7? It almost reads as if some text was cut out accidentally.

Have the authors reflected on the role of race/education in this study? The footnote about participants still comes off as superficial, like they felt they had to acknowledge it but didn’t have the space to discuss what that meant for their project. To me this is a significant thing worth theorizing in more depth, and it seems to lie within the conceptual scope of this project. But even if a sustained and critical discussion can’t be fit in this piece, something doesn’t sit right about just marking the privileged status of the participants and then moving on.