“Design refusal” is an emerging movement in design research and practice that places social justice at the centre of design processes. It raises broader questions about the limits of co-creation and public participation in design. Design refusal has largely foregrounded the responsibility and agency of designers and engineers to disrupt potentially harmful projects within powerful institutions. One key example of design refusal is the collective action of software engineers at Google, where they mobilised against collaboration with the US military (Robinson et al., 2024). Although these acts of refusal offer important lessons, design scholars highlight how focusing on refusal within powerful institutions creates a flawed theory of change which relies on “the goodwill of elites, rather than supporting people’s agency to shape their relationships to data regimes” (Zong and Matias, 2024: 2).

In response to top-down imaginaries of refusal, Jonathan Zong and J Nathan Mathias invite a reorientation towards data refusals enacted “from below” (2024). Their theorisation builds on the work of Indigenous, anti-colonial, and feminist scholars who have highlighted the refusal to contribute to data regimes and scientific research (e.g. Simpson, 2007; Tsosie et al., 2021; Tuck and Yang, 2014). This represents an important shift away from the agency of designers towards the refusals of marginalised publics who are structurally excluded or harmed through dominant design models. For Zong and Mathias, refusal is ultimately a generative “act of design”, as it is through refusal that publics can “reshape socio-technical systems” (2024: 2). In this context, the task for designers is not to limit refusal, but to enable it, and to make it easier to say “no”.

The process of co-creation has received relatively less attention in design refusal discourses. The inclusion of marginalised publics – through a range of processes including ‘co-production’, ‘co-creation’, and ‘public participation’ – is increasingly valued in design institutions and is becoming a normative dimension of design processes. For example, and closer to home, the institutionalisation of co-creation is visible in the 2024 Dutch Design Week in the Four Universities’ of Technology (4TU) theme of Equal Society. Although the valuation of participation in design can be a generative response to the limits of dominant design models (see Costanza-Chock, 2020), it often comes with an assumption that “inclusion” inherently creates just outcomes. The turn to participation presents risks of extractive and exploitative practices for the publics involved – especially when the labour of co-creation remains unpaid and epistemic hierarchies remain intact. In order to avoid “participation washing” (Sloane et al., 2022) it's important to learn from refusals and failures in co-creation processes. Tokenistic calls for inclusion and public participation in design, which do not have justice in mind, can not only reproduce structural inequalities but work to render them invisible.

References

Costanza-Chock S (2020) Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The MIT Press.

Robinson S, Buckley J, Ciolfi L, et al. (2024) Infrastructural justice for responsible software engineering,. Journal of Responsible Technology 19: 100087.

Simpson A (2007) On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue (9). 9. Epub ahead of print 2007.

Sloane M, Moss E, Awomolo O, et al. (2022) Participation Is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, New York, NY, USA, 17 October 2022, pp. 1–6. EAAMO ’22. Association for Computing Machinery. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551624.3555285 (accessed 6 October 2024).

Tsosie KS, Yracheta JM, Kolopenuk JA, et al. (2021) We Have ‘Gifted’ Enough: Indigenous Genomic Data Sovereignty in Precision Medicine. The American journal of bioethics: AJOB 21(4): 72–75.

Tuck E and Yang KW (2014) Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry 20(6). SAGE Publications Inc: 811–818.

Zong J and Matias JN (2024) Data Refusal from Below: A Framework for Understanding, Evaluating, and Envisioning Refusal as Design. ACM J. Responsib. Comput. 1(1): 10:1-10:23.