Relationality, Privacy, & Reciprocity: What Creators of Technology Can Learn from Indigenous Epistemologies
It is no secret that the world in which we live is becoming increasingly digitized — accelerating at an unprecedented, rather alarming, rate. And while this influx of technology has opened doors of opportunity and potential, it is crucial to be aware of the repercussions that it may carry. Perhaps the most substantial effect of the rise of the digital world is the growing disconnect between users and their relationships to the natural world, cultural property, and other people. How can developers and designers use technology as a means to reconnect users with what is important to them? Through the implementation of the Indigenous epistemologies of relationality, privacy, and reciprocity, this gap has the potential to be closed.
In Centering Relationality by Littletree, Duarte, and Belarde-Lewis, relationality can be described as “the acknowledgement that we all exist in relationship to each other, the natural world, ideas, the cosmos, objects, ancestors, and future generations, and furthermore, that we are accountable to those relationships.”¹ When technology is created, often the focus is on how users will interact with the product, but how often do developers and designers consider the product’s impact on the natural world, society as a whole, etc.? In the process of creating technology, developers could take these relationships into account as a means to better understand the impact. Currently, it seems that with the rise of digital mediums of communication and entertainment, people are becoming increasingly out of touch with their relationships and surroundings. Are people starting to prioritize the digital world over the natural world? In our dynamic, modern, society, this may be the truth. We continue to consume excess amount of power, contribute to deforestation, and generate sizeable amounts of waste — all to further develop the digital world. We may not even consider the impact our actions have on the natural world if we neglect to value it or heed it any attention in the first place. But Indigenous creators of technology are already addressing this issue. For example, Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe, MŽtis, and Irish game designer, is creating games that include a relational worldview and seek to reconnect users, particularly youth, to place. In her article Relationality in Indigenous Food and Medicine Games, LaPensée explains that the games she creates:
…each share Indigenous perspectives of resilience in relation to land, traditional foods, and medicines. Each game draws from Indigenous perspectives of relationality to inform visual aesthetics, user interface design, and rules that engage players in Indigenous resilience.²
These games facilitate an education on relationality and how the user must interact with the digitized version of the natural world in a respectful manner. There are consequences to actions that the user takes, representing a realistic view of how the natural world works. Not everything is replenished, regrown, or remade on its own. This is directly applicable to how we treat the world around us, and it is time we take into account the implications of the development of technology and realize that we, as humans, are not the center of the center of creation. Through the careful implementation of relationality, developers and designers can begin to use technology as a medium to reunite users with the natural world — as opposed to doing the opposite.
Privacy is another value that creators of technology can take into account to further connect users to their cultural and intellectual property. The potentially sensitive information that communities hold dear to them has been at risk of exploitation, appropriation, and piracy since the dawn of globalization, but the rise of the Internet has brought about a whole new set of unique challenges. According to Belarde-Lewis in Sharing the Private in Public: Indigenous Cultural Property and online media, copyright laws and patents do not apply to Indigenous cultural and intellectual property because their primary function is “to serve and protect the interests of those who want to make a profit.”³ Furthermore, she explains the fact that:
Communal sensibilities regarding tribal, clan or family ownership versus individual ownership, as well as stewardship, or a caretaking type of relationship, prevents many Native and Indigenous communities from being able to place monetary value on these belongings.
Given that Indigenous communities are clearly at very high risk for having their sensitive information becoming further exploited, how can creators of technology ameliorate this problem — or rather prevent it from occurring in the first place? This is where protocols can be instrumental in protecting sensitive information. Protocols are measures taken to properly handle information, and unlike copyright laws or patents, they can change and adapt to fit the information. The article, Design Justice Network Principles, includes ten steps of protocol that focus on specific user needs and urges creators of technology to center “people who are normally marginalized by design.”⁴ One of the most significant parts of this protocol is seeing designers as facilitators, as opposed to experts. This way, the communities who are impacted have much more of a say in the development of technologies, and this can give the designers a much better sense of what information is to be shared, what is to be kept off the Internet, and who should have access to it. With the exercising of protocols such as the Design Justice Network Priciples, creators of technology can better understand the value of privacy and be more conscious of what information they use or publish to the Internet.
Similar to relationality, reciprocity is another crucial teaching that developers and designers can learn from as means to improve user experience and overall impact of their products. In Making Kin with the Machines, the authors explain that new technology can be treated as kin, but it is necessary to treat these products “reciprocally — and not as mere tools, or worse, slaves to their creators.”⁵ It may be easier for people to create new devices, software, etc. and let them loose into the world without following up on its implications, but a reciprocal relationship could prevent misuse of products, hijacking, and other issues. Similarly, one of the steps of the Design Justice Network principles is prioritizing the “design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.”⁴ It is crucial for creators of technology to be well-intentioned in their work, but also to take responsibility for the repercussions and follow up with users. For anyone who is aiming to create user-centered designs or products, this concept reciprocity is crucial in obtaining sufficient feedback and criticism to improve the user experience.
Reconnecting users to the natural world, their cultural information, and each other is a massive project. However, recognizing the biases and intentions of creators as well as following up on the implications of the products on the users, the world, society, etc. is an excellent place to start. Using the epistemologies of relationality, privacy, and reciprocity, creators of technology anywhere on the globe can learn to create a more inclusive, respectful, and informed user experience.
Sources:
[1] https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/46601
[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1940761.1940764
[4] https://designjustice.org/read-the-principles
[5] https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1
