Shaowen Bardzell brings forward an interesting argument in her work Feminist HCI [1] that says Feminism exists in parallel with ecology and the interaction between its elements but it lacks recognition in the patriarchal society. In her work, the author takes up cases to exemplify her claim while highlighting their advantages. She believes that there lies untapped potential, waiting to influence design practices positively and reshape domain landscapes.
Bardzell explains that having a feminist approach adds to the subjectivity in design. It demotes the elements and processes with universal or standardized procedures to any method, technique, or product while encouraging to make the requirement fulfilling output as standardized as possible across different stakeholders without hampering its usability or desirability. On considering all sets of stakeholders, the result becomes inclusive, enabling personal agency, fulfillment, identity, ensures equity and justice for all, and empowers individuals. The feminist standpoint theory thus proves to be instrumental in adding an overall perspective by considering even the minorities.
The author thoroughly guides the reader through the relationship of Feminism with significant domains of science and technology, the products and services industry, architecture and urban planning, and game design. This allowed her to call attention to the scope of the point of interest. Like other Human-Centered Design processes, the proposed contribution was broken into theory, methodology, user research, and evaluation, making it familiar for the HCI community. After establishing the need for this approach, the paper enumerates the qualities of the Feminist HCI approach. The first one, Pluralism in design, refers to catering to multiple viewpoints rather than a single, universal paradigm. Participation emphasizes the involvement of users in the process. The next quality is Advocacy, which talks about the potential risk of imposition of the designers' perspective on the process, the user, or the output. Ecology encourages the designer to be aware of the wider context and its effect. The embodiment aspect is focused on the improvement of the current quality of embodied design in HCI. The last one is self-disclosure, which, as the name suggests, ensures that any product declares to the user how it affects them.
For this study's purpose, the author did a detailed analysis of existing literature and did case study reviews to find links and connect elements in different domains. The choice of research methods is justified since the derived conclusions were based on theoretical inferences and observations made from practical know-how, making it a complete circle. However, a more detailed approach could have been adopted by the author to aid her research. The usage of ethnographic research methods like interviews and participant observation. It adds value since the qualitative data collected has the users' perspective and environmental and cultural context, influencing their lifestyle and decisions, thereby making it more robust. Any inferences made from academic literature can also be investigated by means of ethnography.
The author had done thorough research to cite examples from the real world that adapted the norms of Feminist HCI, even though it was not an established concept when the products and services mentioned above were initially implemented. Keeping this in mind, one can argue that the work is not entirely novel but is an observation. However, it is essential since it brought together instances from the industry in various contexts that targeted empowerment, justice, equity, etc. The through publication might catch the eye of those novice designers and researchers in the field if it commented on techniques or methods to intervene and the potential areas of intervention. However, many points enumerated in the paper may seem obvious or even intuitive to a reader now that many designers have adopted it to make their research stronger. The results of this conceptualization, i.e., the critique based contributions and generative contributions, are highlighted in the conclusion section. Those, along with the six qualities mentioned above, are applied and studied increasingly today in academia, the products and services, entertainment, and even spirituality industries, adding value to its long-term results. This highlights the revolutionary nature of this domain of HCI.
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