Victor JJ Ma 1005913512
1. How does this technology violate 2-3 principles of Feminist HCI and why?
a. Pluralism: The technology classifies people using “binary-gendered
body-shape data constructs” which results in the user experience being
biased toward the viewpoint of gender being binary, or as she describes it,
one “particular socio-technical configuration of gender normativity”. They
do not have a separate version which helps to better analyze, for example,
people who have gone through sex reassignment surgery.
b. Participation: In the same essence as pluralism, they use binary-gendered
data to produce the datasets for the software. This may be necessary for the
software to determine binary gender labels, however they are not valuing
the view of non-binary people in the design process.
c. Embodiment: It is evident that in their design process they are looking to
produce accurate results to determine binary gender with consideration to
people who would not be emotionally affected by an offensive result. From
the text, Ms. Costanza-Schock is clearly uneasy and humiliated by the
possible results from the software. The developers have not considered the
feelings of non-binary people.
2. What elements (physical, social, etc.) influence this technology’s design and
render it political?
a. The social element of the technology being designed for binary people and
producing an offensive result when used on a nonbinary trans person makes
the technology political. It is political because it shows that the organization
behind it and perhaps the government implementing it have a specific view
on gender which does not account for the rest of the population who classify
as non-binary.
b. Physically, the technology classifies people with binary gender labels and in
some ways violate people’s sense of privacy, which is political as it may be
offensive to non-binary people as well as anyone who is insecure about their
body.
3. A description and justification of how you would revise the design to fix the
violations you found in the first question.
I would first allow the option for some human input on the determination
process, rather than simply taking the machine response because it does not work for all
types of people. An alternate solution would be to produce an alternate version which also
factors non-binary people in some way to the data set, such as possibly using a data label
for non-binary people. It would also possibly reduce the emotional implications of the
result on people by not allowing people to view the result from the machine and allowing
people who are open to all views on gender to deliver the results.