Designing for Agonism: 12 Workers' Perspectives on Contesting Technology Futures

What is it about?

In this paper, we gather 12 workers from a large technology company, as recent participants of a research initiative on the social impact of emerging technologies, to present a collaborative analysis of the opportunities and limitations of dissensus-based approaches to technology research and design. We introduce a series of speculative and deconstructive probes and present findings from their use in four collaborative design sessions. We then draw on the theoretical tradition of Agonism to identify moments of friction, refusal, and disagreement over the course of these sessions. We contend that this approach offers a politically important alternative to consensus-based collaborative design methods and can even surface new rhetorics of contestation within discourses on technology futures. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of worker-authored research and an initial set of opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes as a resource for future efforts to "Design for Agonism."

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Why is it important?

This paper brings together 12 participants and researchers of a series of four design sessions conducted within a large technology company to jointly co-author a perspective on the opportunities and limitations of dissensus-based collaborative design efforts. Our design sessions were motivated by a collective recognition of the need to engage workers and community stakeholders not only in technology design and deployment but also in conversations about their social and ethical dimensions. Conducting this work within the emerging technologies space, in particular, provides a unique opportunity to open sites of intervention where workers can engage politically with technology futures while simultaneously pushing back on the need for formal expertise or training in ethics, business, or research alone. By bringing a diversity of lived experiences and work backgrounds to bear on emerging technology research and, in particular, the potential value of "designing for agonism", this paper contributed: an articulation of a need for expanding existing collaborative approaches to embrace more dissensus-based design; examples of different modes of dissensus that can occur within collaborative encounters; an initial set of opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes that can arise when "designing for agonism’, to serve as a resource for future work; and, finally, a research artifact, i.e., the paper itself, that demonstrates one possible mode of interventionist research and design that concretely addresses the exclusionary infrastructures of technology research and design.