What Octavia Butler can teach us about HCI and design
“You really need to read Parable of the Sower,” my partner reminded me again on our way to Yosemite National Park to celebrate the start of 2020. We were listening to Adrienne Maree Brown and Autumn Brown’s podcast, “How to Survive the End of the World,” which centers around community building as a means for survival through apocalyptic times.
Throughout the first episode, the Brown sisters refer to Octavia Butler, author of the 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, as their source of wisdom for learning how to survive and thrive amidst current threats of global warming, corruption, and systemic violence. As we reflected on how eerily close to “doomsday” 2019 and the past few years have felt, China reported the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 that very same day.
Unlike my partner, I’ve never been a big reader of science fiction. As a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction and Design student at UC Irvine, my reading list this past year has been firmly rooted in academic papers, books, and articles about human-computer interaction (HCI) and design. I spent time reading canonical texts about what constitutes good design and user experiences, like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. As I learned about design principles like affordances, visibility, feedback, and consistency, I was simultaneously becoming more aware of technology’s role in perpetuating systemic oppression.
I was introduced to the works of Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Umoja Noble, two scholars who highlight the relationship between race and technology and how communities of color seldom benefit from and are more often ignored or harmed by technology. Benjamin considers herself to be “a student of Octavia Butler” and believes that speculative fiction can help drive innovation. In a 2018 interview, she said, “I consider social science and speculative fiction complementary modes of thinking. Whereas social science offers tools to read reality, speculative fiction cultivates an imagination to change it.”
Octavia Butler had long understood how our past and present connect with our imagined futures. She saw science fiction as a method “for looking ahead” in such a way that is not about “what our future will be, but how we think about it, foresee it.” In other words, science fiction can help us think critically about our past and present in order to be better equipped to shape the future.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, massive unemployment, California wildfires, ongoing protests against police brutality and racial injustice, and with a strong desire for change, I finally read Parable of the Sower. What follows is a reflection of how the book connects to current events, my own experiences as a designer and MHCID student, and more broadly, what we, as designers of technology, can and should do during this time of crisis.
A Brief Synopsis of Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Sower begins in the year 2024, when the United States is collapsing due to climate change, disease, wealth inequality, corporate greed, and corruption. The few communities that are left standing protect themselves behind massive walls and guns, while people living outside the walls are forced to resort to scavenging, theft, and violence in order to survive. Police only exist to serve and protect the wealthy, while entire cities and basic necessities like water have become privatized.
Amidst the chaos, we are introduced to Lauren Olamina, a young Black woman who was born with hyperempathy syndrome, giving her the ability to feel other people’s pain and pleasure. After losing her entire family and community to violence, Lauren embarks on a dangerous journey north to find safety. Along the way, she becomes increasingly convinced that humanity needs to be united by a common goal in order to work through our problems and survive. She befriends other “sharers,” people who also have hyperempathy, and her traveling party grows into a small, diverse community called Acorn. Building off of writings that she started during childhood, Lauren forms a new religion, Earthseed, which has the ultimate goal of traveling beyond Earth to “take root among the stars.” Through conscious effort and careful consideration of the past and present, she creates Earthseed’s tenets to help guide this new community towards a better, more just future.
Like Lauren, most designers are driven by their desire to do good and empathize with other people. As designers of technology, we perpetually try to seek better outcomes for the problems we are tasked to solve. Yet, we often fail to consider how our designs may perpetuate existing systems of oppression, ultimately ignoring or harming LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), immigrants, and disabled people in the process. Not surprisingly, I found Earthseed’s tenets to be very relevant to HCI and design. Below, I briefly describe some of these tenets and how they can provide an additional lens to help designers consider the broader societal, cultural, and political implications of our designs in order to build more inclusive solutions. I also reinforce each one with learnings from my own design projects and readings from HCI and design scholars.
Applying Earthseed Tenets within HCI and Design
“Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.
Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.”— EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING (Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 116)
In Parable of the Sower, Lauren grows up in a walled community. Her entire childhood and experiences are initially defined and constrained within these walls. To her community, the wall represents safety and stability, but to people on the outside, it represents division and inequality.
This is echoed in Sasha Costanza Chock’s Design Justice, which explains how affordances can privilege some people while denying others. In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman describes an affordance as “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determines just how the object could possibly be used.” For example, a chair affords sitting, while a door knob affords turning. However, Chock argues that not all affordances are equally perceptible or available to everyone.
You don’t have to look far to find a real world example. The sudden and massive shift to remote learning and working due to COVID-19 has created both opportunities and challenges for people with disabilities. Schools and workplaces have long denied people with disabilities accommodations to work and learn at home. Yet, this pandemic has shown how these accommodations could be made widely and swiftly. Now more people with disabilities are able to work and learn remotely, but only after accommodations were granted to the wider population.
This shift has also highlighted multiple barriers. For some students with disabilities, remote learning is far from matching the same level of care and attention they receive with in-person services. Additionally, people with disabilities experience two “digital divides.” First, people with disabilities are three times more likely to say they never go online than non-disabled Americans and are less likely to own a computer, smartphone, tablet, or have high-speed internet. Secondly, even if they do have access to technology, that technology may be inaccessible. A study done by WebAIM found that just 1.9 percent of the top million websites meet the Web Content Accessibility (WCAG) Guidelines.
With Design Justice, Chock says that designers must consider the ways race, class, gender, and disability shape and constrain access to affordances. This means that there is usually no single universal design to account for all people. Instead, there are multiple configurations.
For our MHCID capstone project, my team wanted to make sure that the learning management system we were building was as accessible as possible. We did audits to check for color contrast, and also tested with students, including those who had autism, to check for confusing language. We made sure our images had alt text, and online video had captions. When considering and working with people with disabilities throughout the design process, our designs became more inclusive and accessible.
Earthseed Tenet:
All struggles
Are essentially
power struggles.
Who will rule?
Who will lead?
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design— EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING (Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 94)
In Parable of the Sower, Lauren asserts that slavery never really went away. Instead, it evolved into a new form: debt slavery. Given no other choice, people are forced to give up their freedom in order to seek the safety of privatized cities. The government dismantles laws used to protect workers and give corporations more power. Corporations ultimately use this power to shape and design programs that uphold class and racial inequities to their benefit.
When political theorist Langdon Winner famously argued that “artifacts have politics” in 1980, he believed that technologies embody the social and political relations and power of the people who built it. For example, he described the low-hanging overpasses built in Long Island between the 1920s and 1970s that prevented public buses from reaching the Rockaway beaches. As a result, Black people and low-income people, who normally used bus services, were denied access to the beaches, while middle- and upper-class white people who had cars were granted access. Whether or not it was intentional is unknown, but what is clear is that technology is never neutral and that it is always political.
Human-centered design (HCD) has long been used as an approach to understand users and involve them in the design process. However, HCD largely leaves it up to the designer to determine who to consider as a user and when to involve them in the process. This can lead to technology benefiting one group while excluding others. In Design Justice, Chock mentions that the choice of which users to center is inherently political. Typically, designers default to imagined users whose experiences are similar to their own. This tends to favor members of dominant groups: those who are (cis)male, white, heterosexual, non-disabled, college-educated, with broadband internet, and access to technologies.
In one of my classes, I was tasked to create a digital solution to help alleviate the harms of gentrification. Gentrification itself can be considered a wicked problem, one that no single design solution can easily solve. Although the project was done with good intentions, there were constraints and decisions made that prevented those who were most impacted by gentrification to have a say in the design process. For example, we recruited property owners, new transplants, and multi-generational residents from a wide range of places to participate in a survey to ask about their experiences concerning gentrification. However, because our primary means of recruitment was through our own social networks, our participant pool heavily leaned towards people that were very similar to us: white and East Asian, between the ages of 25–34, middle class, and college-educated. There were very few participants that actually had lived experience of being directly impacted by gentrification and displacement.
As designers, it’s important to recognize and acknowledge the immense power we yield in deciding who gets to participate and make decisions in the design process. Echoing the phrase “nothing about us without us” used by disability rights activists, we should aim towards centering the people most impacted by the outcomes of our designs.
To Change and be Changed and Where to Go from Here
Earthseed Tenet:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.”— EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING (Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 3)
This year has brought a flood of challenges that makes it easy to feel like we’re all trapped by its currents, unable to do anything about it. However, these challenges present a unique opportunity for change. A recent MHCID alumni survey that assessed COVID-19’s effect on UX and remote work highlighted how some see the pandemic as an opportunity for innovation. One alumni in particular said this makes a strong case for “research-driven UX, as the world moves towards a new normal.”
Like Octavia Butler, we can harness the power of speculative fiction to reflect on our past and present and help shape our “new normal.” What do we want to keep? What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to change?
Lauren’s Earthseed is rooted in the idea that change is inevitable and that we can either nurture and direct it or have our lives dictated by it. Earthseed starts off as a tiny community living in the wilderness, but its ultimate goal is to steer the course of humanity for generations to come.
As designers of technology, we rarely think about our work on such a grand scale. But thinking big offers the focus needed to strategically plant small seeds of change. It is these small changes, done with intentionality, partnerships, and reflection, that build the necessary foundation towards more inclusive and equitable futures.
