Black (🧑🏾‍💻) to the Future:

How Black Women, Femmes, and Non-Binary People Imagine the Future of Technology

The title slide to my dissertation defense oral presentation that accompanied the written document.

As the first Black person to graduate with a Ph. D. in Information Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, I look back on my dissertation research and feel proud to have used my doctoral platform to amplify the voices of marginalized people and their futuring for technology.

If you would like to read my dissertation, please feel free to do so here:

Klassen, Shamika. 2024. “Black to the Future: How Black Women, Femmes, and Non-Binary People Imagine the Future of Technology.” University of Colorado at Boulder ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. 31149126.

My dissertation defense is also available below if you would like to watch me present this work to my committee and my various communities.

However, if you would like a highlight and overview of my dissertation research, read on!

Each participant who provided their mailing address received a hand-written thank you note, a gift of stickers, lavender tea, a futuring guidebook, and instructions for the pre-design activity. This intentional gesture signaled to participants that they were more than just numbers in my research but valued people whose engagement was appreciated.

Gathering Data through Futuring

My dissertation was conducted across two studies. In May of 2024, my research assistant Joanna Mendy and I co-facilitated two sets of three speculative co-design workshops with a total of 29 Black women, femmes, and non-binary people.

— Study 1: Afrofuturing in/with Community —

RQ1) What would Black women, femmes, and non-binary people design as speculative future technologies?

RQ2) How do Black women, femmes, and non-binary people incorporate Afrofuturism into their designs?

RQ3) How do Black women, femmes, and non-binary people imagine the benefits and harms of speculative technology designs?

RQ4) In what ways do the lived experiences of Black women, femmes, and non-binary people inform their design of future technology artifacts?

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The first set of workshops focused on afrofuturistic activities intended to guide participants in developing a future communication technology. UI/UX Designer Mikayla Buford attended the workshops and created digital prototypes of the designs from each workshop.

All three speculative co-design artifacts from my first dissertation study were designed with participants and UI/UX Designer Mikayla Buford

After each workshop the UI/UX designer Mikayla took the ideas, discussions, and sketches from participants and created speculative design artifacts in the form of a digital prototype.

Here are those three artifacts clockwise from the top:

1. WHIMS, the next generation of healthy communication
2. The Great Pantry of Alexandria, an open door for everyone
3. Calmune — commune together using your whole body.

However, because Calmune was the most complete and comprehensive artifact, it was selected for study two participants to critique. A portmanteau of “calm” and “commune,” the Calmune app and smart jewelry allow thought-mediated conversation equipped with privacy and security features that keep the audio, text, and thought messages you send and receive safe.

The participants who created this design were Quinn Allen, Michelle Lockett, Meies Matz and Daisy Aponte who named the artifact in her sketch during the workshop.

— Study 2: Engaging with the Future Critically —

RQ1) What themes emerge when Black women, femmes, and non-binary people engage in ethical speculation with technology?

RQ2) How do lived experiences impact how Black women, femmes, and non-binary people ethically speculate the future of technology?

RQ3) What kinds of dystopian and utopian visions do Black women, femmes, and non-binary people hold?

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In the second set of workshops, we split the time in half. The first portion of the workshop was spent critiquing one of the digital prototypes from the first set of workshops. In the second portion, we engaged in an ethical speculation exercise: the Black Mirror Writer’s Room Exercise. I added a section about Afrofuturism to the activity deck and, after presenting context about the series, tech news that informs episodes, and instructions, the participants split into groups and created pitches for a Black Mirror episode.

Each pitch engages ethical speculation and the imaginative sensibilities of participants who used the framework to extrapolate current sociotechnical ails and explore potential challenges in the near future. Here are some examples of the pitches.

Luday and Quaneisha created the pitch entitled Underground Railroad and they renamed Black Mirror to “One Way Mirror” because the they felt that use of “Black” was derogatory. This pitch involves the dystopian theme of a lack of access to healthcare and the utopian theme of a technologically mediated life that enables people to lean on others for help.

Underground Railroad

Jamie, an executive at a pharmacological company living in the deep south, finds that they have an unplanned pregnancy for which they will not be permitted to freely choose to terminate.

They use the New Underground Railroad to find untrackable and untraceable help in safer regions of the country.

The pitch, Bl@ck Love, by Entity and Candace features a dystopian theme of a technologically mediated life impacted by potentially culturally insensitive algorithms that facilitate important life decisions like who to love.

Bl@ck Love

A Black woman searching for love turns to AI to create her perfect partner.

But in a world where AI isn’t built to reflect Black women’s needs and desires, will she find what she’s looking for?

The dystopia of modern-day public education and the culture wars against books and curriculums that center and celebrate marginalized lives is apparent in this pitch by Janae and Sophia as is the dystopia of our current climate change crisis. On the utopian side, students were able to eventually gain access to an education that allowed them to learn about their culture and history.

“Too Smart for Your Own Good”

Black students in Florida are being taught history in a conservative school district using an algorithmically driven curriculum focused on “American values”.

When they are forced to relocate due to a weather disaster, they are enrolled in a school in another state.

While the school is less-resourced, technologically that is, what students learn makes them question everything.

They enter their villain era and spiral mentally after realizing what they’ve been taught isn’t real.

Learnings for Technologists, Designers, and Developers

After designing and critiquing speculative technologies in the first study, the participants shared what they would want technologists — designers and developers — to know or do differently as they innovate technologies in their work.

The first recommendation is to respect and defer to Blackness and Black women, femmes and non-binary people. Kay Coghill asserted that more Black people need to be consulted and in the room.

Secondly, technologists would do well to hold a higher standard of ethics in their work. Quinn Allen said to “Have more common sense and ethics. Just because it’s cool and different doesn’t mean it’s good for Humanity or the planet.”

The third recommendation pointed to a need for product cycles that take the time and intention to incorporate the perspectives and needs of marginalized people. The main way participants expressed this need was through accessibility which they recognized as important over and above profit.

Participants also agreed that products that make it to market but apply accessibility and inclusivity as afterthoughts show it. Agazeet Haile claimed that accessibility should be made a primary point of product creation and not an afterthought with updates.

Another recommendation is that diversity needs to be on both sides of the design process from designers to lived experts. Layla spoke from her experience in the workshops to say, “Our group idea was informed by experiences, research, and care for others. If only a certain type of person’s experiences and ideas are represented in technology, a lot of people are left out.”

The next recommendation is the experience of marginalized people invited into the design process is as important as their ability to contribute. Daisy Aponte pointed out that, “Designers and developers should “be more receptive to the different perspectives in the room.”

Lastly, even though participants shared sharp criticisms for the professionals who create technologies, participants did express an understanding and empathy for the people behind the product. Participants recognized how hard it is for tech teams who have to balance the demands on their job, of their job, and the possibility that they may lose their job as massive layoffs were occurring regularly in the tech industry at the time of the workshops in May of 2023. One participant wrote on a sticky note that, “Unfortunately, tech designers have to play the difficult role of advocating for user needs, communicating business value and protecting themselves from layoffs and general stress. It’s rough out there. I wish that wasn’t the truth.”

Insights Yielded from Ethical Speculation

The Black Mirror Writers Room exercise pitches at first blush represent narratives participants do not want to see. Despite leaning into dystopian futures fueled by technologies gone wrong or rogue, participants still exposed their desired futures.

The reverse or inverse of the pitches highlighted futures wherein Black people had freedom of bodily autonomy. Futures wherein technological systems supported and affirmed their identities and desires. And futures wherein Black people possess agency with the technologies that they create and with which they engage.

Lived Experiences Influence Futuring

When it comes to how participants drew from lived experiences, their first or second-hand social justice issues became fodder for allegory in the pitches.

As allegories are narrative devices that allow truths and personal knowledge to be disseminated, the way participants engaged in them harkens to the notion of counter-storytelling found in Critical Race Theory.

In both cases, stories are told which reveal a message that illuminates a potentially new perspective.

Cultivating counterpublics through the appropriation of technology

Habermas’ (1962) concept of the public square was encompassed mainly by white middle class men discussing their grievances with the state in third spaces.

A third space is a public location separate from one’s home, work, or school like a cafe (Oldenburg, 1999).

Subsequently, the counterpublic involves marginalized people countering oppressive narratives and organizing for justice.

Black Twitter is one such space where Black people online employ Black oral traditions within a sociotechnical system for empowerment, mutual uplift, and bearing witness to or sharing stories of oppression and state-sanctioned violence (Klassen et al., 2021).

Impediments of culturally incompetent technology

Both Bl@ck Love and Too Smart for Your Own Good exhibit artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools that facilitate important and integral life experiences without considerations for the marginalized groups impacted.

When experiences like finding love or getting an education are negotiated in large part through systems that rely on AI/ML, the people for whom the systems were not designed for suffer the consequences.

The choice to opt-out of these systems becomes less and less available, especially the more marginalized you are (Eubanks, 2018).

Even though the people disproportionately impacted by the algorithms have little recourse, the hope is that awareness of the issue and repeated outrage, backlash, and taking tech to task will result in marked improvements.

As it stands, the so called “mistakes” and “glitches” (Benjamin, 2019a; Broussard, 2023) that continue to happen, ostensibly get patched and quickly moved on from until the next public debacle.

Calls to Action

Technologists can cultivate Afrofuturist design throughout their processes to encourage speculation and contributions from marginalized people across a menagerie of intersectional identities.

There is merit and value in engaging in ethical speculation and the Black Mirror Writers Room exercise is a great start. More designers and researchers can take these studies and replicate them by inviting different marginalized communities to participate and amplify their visions and offerings.

Traditional, new, and social media can give diverse and marginalized narratives their due by financially supporting speculative narratives that center marginalized stories.

Everyone plays a role in achieving the Afrofuture.

For people with privilege due to systems of power, recognize that we all have a responsibility to learn about our role in upholding those systems, pursue ways to dismantle them, and to seek out allyship and advocacy.

For marginalized people, I encourage us to craft, tap into, and carry our Afrofuture. Our Chicanafuture. Our Asian future. Our African future.

Engage in speculative media across all identities, create your own, and find communities and people with which to share and grow your visions.

Why I Did What I Did

Encouraging Black women, femmes, and non-binary people to future does more than yield futuristic technology designs, it does something for them. Making space for them to future opens up a space in their imagination that can fuel deeper insights about themselves, compassion for their communities, and visions of hope.

Over the course of this research, I have changed my orientation from solely engaging industry about marginalized people to centering and amplifying marginalized voices for ourselves.

I now define technology beyond the digital and open my understanding of technology from traditional and recent manifestations to make room for ancient, ancestral, cultural and communal technologies

I can see from participants the power of speculation and futuring in community.

The responses after the workshops included participants wishing the sessions were longer and that they had more opportunities to speculate and future.

I hope that one contribution of this research is to inspire and encourage people interested in designing and developing technology in human centered ways to consider speculation with marginalized communities as an integral part of the process.

Octavia Butler as rendered by Nettrice Gaskins

“There is nothing new

under the sun,

but there are

new suns.”

— Octavia Butler

With new suns come new worlds and the vastness of possibility.

I hope this research spurs us all toward these new suns together led by the visions of the marginalized and equipped with our own Afrofutures.