EDITOR
Eli Blevis
eblevis@indiana.edu
The Lens of Feminist HCI
in the Context of Sustainable
Interaction Design
Shaowen Bardzell
Indiana University at Bloomington | selu@indiana.edu
Eli Blevis
Indiana University at Bloomington | eblevis@indiana.edu
Recently, I learned that Shaowen Bardzell had
proposed a notion of feminist HCI. I wondered if
feminist HCI was connected to values-rich interpretations of interaction design, and if there were
implications for sustainability in the context of
interaction design. Feminism is long associated
with environmentalism as a matter of environmental ethics—in particular as a potential
counterpoint to “dualistic and hierarchical modes
of thinking” that set humankind in opposition
to nature [ 1]. What follows is the conversation
Bardzell and I had with respect to feminist HCI
and sustainability.
Eli Blevis: Shaowen, can you describe feminist HCI?
Shaowen Bardzell: Of course! Feminism is not
always well understood, especially in politics and
the media. People sadly identify it with man-bash-ing and worse. Yet it is a well-established intellectual tradition, with its own body of theory and
applications throughout academia and industry,
particularly in traditional design fields, such as
industrial design, fashion, and architecture.
One might identify feminism’s central tenets
as commitments to agency, fulfillment, identity,
equality, empowerment, and social justice. I think
these commitments make feminism a natural ally
to interaction design. As computers increasingly
become a part of everyday life, feminism is poised
to help us understand how gender identities and
relations shape both the use and design of interactive technologies—and how things could be
otherwise, through design.
By “feminist HCI,” I mean the integration of
feminist perspectives as a resource for HCI, much
like it has been in the past for traditional design
[ 2]. On the one hand, feminism can be used as a
critical strategy to analyze designs and design
processes in order to expose their unintended
consequences and examine how technologies
construct and/or perpetuate the gender divide.
On the other hand, interaction design practitio-
ners can also integrate feminist approaches into
all stages of the design process, including user
research, prototyping, and evaluation, to generate
new design insights and influence the design pro-
cess tangibly. I see it being applied in obvious and
fruitful ways in many key areas of HCI: domes-
tic computing, information and communication
technologies for development (ICT4D), ubiquitous
computing, health informatics, and of course sus-
tainable interaction design!
[ 1] Brennan, A. and
Lo, Y.S. (2002, revised
2008). Environmental
Ethics. In Stanford
Encyclopedia of
Philosophy;
http://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/ethics-environmental/
#FemEnv/
[ 2] Bardzell, S.
“Feminist HCI: Taking
Stock and Outlining an
Agenda for Design.”
Proceedings of CHI’10:
World Conference
on Human Factors in
Computing Systems.
ACM: New York, April
2010
March + April 2010
