Background

In recent decades, we have seen a steady increase in feminist theories and practices in HCI. It can be said that feminisms have moved from the margin to the center of HCI and resulted in large amounts of articles with a feminist focus. Feminisms have also evolved to critique the category itself, incorporating queer, crip, decolonial, post-humanist theories and more. We especially note the presence of feminist knowledge practices that more often are embedded in methodologies and conceptual devices, though influencing the field core practice. Feminist approaches have contributed to important innovations in the design field, for example:

• Acknowledging how technologies are gendered and racialized and reproduced performatively [35].
• Recognizing technology’s potential for enabling constraints and proactively designing for liberation [22].
• · Challenging researchers to consider the multi-faceted, compounding aspects of discrimination through intersectional perspectives [18,34].
• Developing design practices that question normative values and apply crip and queer theory to recognize people’s complex identities [9].
• Adding a decolonial lens, dismantling and reimagining existing power structures, as well as balancing Western heavy influences in technology design [16,25].
• Introducing the idea of feminist care practices, attending to who, what and how things get cared for [23].
• Developing a feminist post-humanist design, decentering the human in the design process [29].
• Combining feminist utopianism with participatory design methods to explore a radically better future as designers without attempting to define that future as a prerequisite to action [5].
• Contributing to fairness-aware machine learning algorithms [8,27], and more feminist human-robot interaction [38].

While feminisms have influenced the field and grown in popularity, it can be at times difficult to distinguish what feminist HCI is. Much like CSCW/social computing as a whole, it seeks to develop and improve society in various ways.

Feminist perspectives have not least importantly contributed to pointing out how different norms and beliefs affect what we choose to study, and how we see the purpose of design. This has motivated research that provides alternative perspectives and examines marginalized groups. Here, the design interventions compensate in various ways for the injustices of society and have the ambition to set things right so that the inequalities are reduced. In Sara Ahmed’s words, one can formulate it as “institutions that have historically been sites of exclusion ‘will become’ inclusive; those that have historically been white ‘will become’ diverse” [1]. Feminism in this perspective is about resolving old historical injustices.

However, feminist theory is not just about resolving historical injustices. It can also be about creatively exploring the limits and opportunities of technology, making the ordinary extraordinary through exaggerations and distortions, and with attention to the (sometimes painful) details [6]. As bell hooks point out, theory is a liberatory practice, that heals when it challenges the status quo [21]. In her text “Feminist Wonder” Sara Ahmed [2] points out how it is the excitement to see the situation beyond our preconceptions about it, which is a central passion in a feminist practice motivated by affect, curiosity, wonder, and a desire to destabilize and alter structures. It is important here to point out that wonder and astonishment are not about happiness or distancing oneself from the ordinary, but to get in touch with how the ordinary is made, and to connect the personal experience with the political, using these painful glitches to disturb and destabilize unequal orders. When approaching a ‘queered’ expression of use with wonder and joy, we may not only critique the original form and its exclusions, but also discover category defying inspiration for novel design [3].

In this working group, we therefore want to revisit our feminist roots, where theory is a liberatory and creative practice, and consider which of our theoretical tools we consider useful for making us feel amazed and misbehave. We embrace queer feminist HCI’s call for mess, variety, flexibility and sustainability[28]. The goal of this workshop is to create an inventory in the form of a toolkit of feminist theories and concepts that have had (or could have) an impact on our work as designers, educators, researchers, and activists, to see things differently and make a societal intervention. But we’re also curious about how design research and new digital tools, have influenced feminist theory.

Toolkits in HCI have themselves received critique for their prepotency for normative use [30,39] As a genre, toolkits consist of useful things with a script and accompanying epistemology of best practice in particular scenarios. In spaces such as HCI research, however, a singular ‘best practice’ cannot address sufficient complexities and challenges in a singular toolkit. Calls to incorporate feminist, queer, participatory ideas into the use of toolkits challenge the authority of a ‘best practice’, instead encouraging queer uses of the tools within [32]. In this spirit, we will treat these tools as objects whose value and purpose evolve with context, rather than as a stagnant expert recommendation.

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