"Data Justice" By Design
Dawn Walker · 2018
The ubiquity of mobile technologies has led communities to engage with environmental and political concerns through collecting, representing, and analysing data. Activist engagement through data collection aims to hold businesses and the state to account--positioning itself against big data and proprietary technologies that foreclose on agency. Design scholars have unique insight to bring as society addresses the ethical and social issues emerging from data-driven technologies and their development. In my dissertation I focus on the design of civic technologies for environmental accountability--map platforms, mapping techniques, and ambient sensor networks for documenting pollution. By adopting an action research framework to investigate these projects, my research examines how critically-informed, participatory practices intervene to build more sustainable and equitable socio-technical systems, contributing an understanding of how these practices can be applied in new contexts.