margelacool

your environment your embodied experiences and a bunch of stuff makes you expect things from life 

but sometimes (quite often in fact), there is a misalignment between what you see/hear/touch/perceive and what you expect

what do you do?

you either do nothing or act

let’s imagine you act

cool its means that you have the mental, economical, physical, cultural resources to do so

how do you want to act?

your environment your embodied experiences and a bunch of stuff draws your preferences towards a “strategy”

in this moment it seems like the best strategy to shorten that misalignment gap

in the process you hope that what you see/hear/touch/perceive is a bit more aligned with what you expected

just to be clear strategy here is not a tactic in the narrow sense, I see it as a way of being, that influences our decisions and collective actions

*\non exhaustive list of strategies\*
you love to create visual stuff and making things, your strategy might be to design objects for your community of change
you love the power of words in the constitution, your strategy might be to interrogate the history and meaning of specific concepts in the constitution
you love to solve puzzling problems, your strategy might be to come up with an inventive technical solution and automating a process 
you love to dance, your strategy might be to move people’s feelings with waves and body rhythms 
you love to speak, your strategy might be to change people’s view with rhetoric’s and rimes
you love stories, your strategy might be to take people on a journey far away and then back to their realities 
blabla

lots of strategies

all complement each other 

because they are all cool

they will evolve throughout your life

you can even have multiple strategies at once

crazy

the key is to make them speak to each other and select the perfect combination at the right time

personally, I see a misalignment with how rights are implemented online 

friends of mine do not care about this 

some see a misalignment in the way we educate the police to sexual harassment

I also share this misalignment 

but I have decided to not act on it 

my friend does, that’s cool, she is cool

back to my “misalignment”

because of my environment, embodied experiences and a bunch of stuff, I love to create visual stuff and interview people

 last week I met people who share the same misalignment but have a different strategy

they do strategic litigation to pursue platforms accountability

I wonder what do we both expect?

how could we complement each other?

how could we concoct the best combination and speak to each other?

---

before thinking of synergies and concoctions, I asked myself what the heck is strategic litigation to pursue platforms accountability?

Here are my key takeaways

• it’s for people who love law + disclosing unknown injustices, hence it goes hand in hand with advocacy
• their strategy is to use litigation as a tool to bring societal change
• seems like the choice of the case you bring to court is crucial and has to stem from the community impacted by it
• the expected outputs are to enforce law, clarify the meaning of law, challenge law, create new laws
•  the expected outcomes are much more ambitious/abstract and seek to create public awareness, policy change… hence eventually shorten this misalignment gap  
• however online platform harm are a social-technical mess – for instance, with recommender systems it is never the algorithm alone (which changes a lot and is more a combination of algorithms than one algorithm) it is the front-end design + the end-user behavior + the combination of algorithms – yes it is messy – so of course, these people are struggling to gather  socio-technical evidences – yeah, because in addition to the social-technical mess we don’t know how the combination of algorithms works ( if you want to know more about the struggle https://issuu.com/digitalfreedomfund/docs/evidence_gathering_report_v4)

but I am not here for the evidence gathering socio-technical mess

I am here for the attempt to bring change

even if one of strategic litigation expected outcome might be to change the user experience design, there is not much dialogue with designers and litigators

expect from “anti-patterns” (also called dark patterns or deceptive design) which people seem to be obsessed about (yeah the old choice architecture vs choice manipulation debate)

rather than talking endlessly about anti-patterns, may I ask what kind of change do strategic litigators and designers want to see ? what role plays human-centered design in this change? how can both converge ?

if we stop at “yeah, online platform should be more transparent about their recommender systems main parameters”, we will end up yet AGAIN complaining about anti-patterns, or how bad is the pop up explaining you why a video on pregnancy and giving birth in arctic north came up on your feed

if we want strategic litigation to achieve change, one idea would be to involve designers and participatory design methodologies during the post judgement implementations

you know what they say “the devil is in the details” and even if we cannot give design guidelines to platforms, we cannot expect them out of pure good will, to deliver for example, relevant contestability processes (the ability to contest algorithmic decisions)

“There is a role for HCI* practioners here, to design novel contestation experiences that are informed by human-centred values and practices”

Lyons, H., Velloso, E., & Miller, T. (2021). Conceptualising contestability: Perspectives on contesting algorithmic decisions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1-25.

*HCI = Human Computer Interaction

to be continued …

---

Credit to Emilie Lor/@_kkhomos for the speedy snail (go check her work now)