Ina Wagner

This book brings together the vast research literature about gender and technology to help designers understand what a gender perspective and a focus on intersectionality can contribute to designing information technology systems and artifacts, and to assist organizations as they work to develop work cultures that are supportive of women and marginalized genders and people. Drawing on empirical and analytical studies of women's work and technology in many parts of the world, the book addresses how to make invisible aspects of work visible; how to recognize women's skills without falling into the trap of gender stereotyping; how to engage in improving working conditions; and how to defend care of life situations and needs against a managerial logic. It addresses challenges for design, including many overlooked and undervalued aspects, such as the complexities involved in human–machine interactions, as well as the need to create safe spaces for research subjects.

This book brings together the vast research literature about gender and technology to help designers understand what a gender perspective and a focus on intersectionality can contribute to designing information technology systems and artifacts, and to assist organizations as they work to develop work cultures that are supportive of women and marginalized genders and people. Drawing on empirical and analytical studies of women's work and technology in many parts of the world, the book addresses how to make invisible aspects of work visible; how to recognize women's skills without falling into the trap of gender stereotyping; how to engage in improving working conditions; and how to defend care of life situations and needs against a managerial logic. It addresses challenges for design, including many overlooked and undervalued aspects, such as the complexities involved in human–machine interactions, as well as the need to create safe spaces for research subjects.

Innovative research solutions increasingly require deep engagement with practitioners to manage the complex problems they are attempting to solve. This often project-based research is equipped with finite resources over a limited period without much thought into future-proofing the practice. These projects must face questions of what happens when a product comes to an end and whether there are any lasting positive effects once the IT systems are no longer being actively developed. From a computing perspective, the challenge is to design IT artifacts that contribute to improving the user's work and everyday life in a sustainable way, thereby also contributing to social and ecological sustainability. Future-Proofing: Making Practice-Based IT Design Sustainable documents the experiences made by several leading research groups in Europe, North America, and South Africa. It describes their efforts to achieve sustainable design results, the difficulties that barred the way but also the strategies they adopted to achieve the goal of sustainability. The analysis of these cases has inspired thinking about how to more systematically address and possibly overcome the impediments to sustainability. This book develops a strong future-oriented perspective that conceptualizes sustainability as a complex and highly variegated issue and formulates insights and recommendations with a view to help researchers to better design for sustainability.

Providing a critical view on user participation in design, disentangling decision making and power in design, this book uses fieldwork material from two large participatory design projects: one experimental in the field of urban planning, the other a product development project within health care. Addressing power issues in participatory design is critical to providing a realistic view of the possibilities and limitations of participation. Design is decision-making: during a design process a huge number of decisions taken before the designers end up with a design result - an artefact or system. All decisions are a choice between possibilities and selecting one of them and making it concrete as a change in an artefact is a demonstration of the capacity to transform, which is a key aspect of power. Participatory designers are committed to empowering users and facilitating a design process where users are able to take part in all types of decisions. This volume explores the challenges for practitioners of participatory design arising from this commitment by asking what participation really means: who should participate and in which parts of a design process; what does it mean to share power with users; how are decisions to be made in a participatory way and what is it that users participate in? The book provides a conceptual framework for understanding these issues as well as a fresh look at participation.