“We believe that feminism can contribute to good design”

Feminist Internet is a non-profit organisation co-founded by the artist, designer and PhD Charlotte Webb, which emerged at London’s University of the Arts in 2017. Webb will participate in the talks «Good design is…» and we have spoken with her and with fellow co-founder, Georgina Capdevila about how the internet is designed and what can we do to improve it from a more ethical, integrative and egalitarian perspective.

I think Dieter Rams might have missed a principle of good design… feminism! What do you think?

Yes! We believe that feminism can contribute to good design both by offering a critique of the social and cultural inequalities that are reproduced in the technological structures we use, and by offering practical methods for re-evaluating the design process.

You advocate a feminist internet, which makes me think that the stats of who designs the internet and for who are not very equal, diverse and inclusive. Which is the reality?

There is certainly an imbalance between who designs the internet and who uses it. For example, according to a recent report by the AI Now Initiative, Only 18% authors at major AI conferences are women; Over 80% of AI professors are men; Women comprise only 15% of AI research staff at Facebook & 10% at Google; There is no public data on trans workers or other gender minorities, and only 2.5% of Google’s workforce is black, while Facebook and Microsoft are each at 4%. This is obviously alarming, and something needs to be done. As well as a diversity crisis, there are also major imbalances because of corporate monopoly, which distorts the market and can stifle innovation for smaller companies that might care about ethics more than the big 4.

What things do you do to promote the design of a feminist internet?

We run workshops, seminars, talks and have recently released a podcast. These things are designed to engage young people at university as well as the general public. On the consultancy side of things, we work with businesses to address biases and inequalities that might exist in company culture or in products that they are developing.

What can the users of the internet do to make it a more equal space?

There’s no magic wand, and there isn’t one thing that everyone can or would like to do, but we can all create and consume content consciously. You could unfollow Instagram accounts that promote problematic body images, and follow ones about body positivity instead; You could make sure that you keep an eye out for people receiving online abuse and reach out to them with a message of support, or report the abuser; You could support workers in technology companies that are protesting about sexual harassment or unequal pay; You could use an alternative search engine like Duck Duck Go instead of Google; You could contribute to the World White Web project to help re-balance search engine results; You could consider alternatives to Spotify, like Resonate; You could actively choose to diversify your news feed to see opinions from groups you don’t naturally identify with…

How do you set to work with something as vast as the internet, which is also now extremely connected to product design through the IoT? Where do you start?

We start with research; Identifying where there are issues, and then try to come up with practical ways of addressing them. With the Internet of Things, for example, we’ve been focusing on the gendering of personal intelligent assistants like Alexa. We look at the ways they are biased and then design workshops that help young people re-imagine these technologies with feminist values in mind. We also published a report where we gathered all the findings and presented the prototypes that workshop participants created: bit.ly/feministalexareport

How has your background in art and design influenced the way you have shaped and you envision the Feminist Internet movement?

Art and design is at the centre of everything we do. It gives us a very special combination of critical thinking, irreverence and imagination. We really believe in how art and design practices, underpinned by open and progressive dialogue around these issues (on and offline), can bring positive and effective social change.

The visual identity of the organisation, developed by Conor Rigby, has also been really central – Conor’s ability to make the concepts come to life and be playful whilst dealing with very serious topics has, I think, carried us a very long way.

Overall, expressing ourselves aesthetically is crucial to sharing our work with wide audiences, and engaging complex issues with a sense of playfulness and humour. Something else we have discovered through putting together the narratives for our events programme is how visual metaphors can support our research and presentations. We believe in the power of metaphors to help think through and shape technological, social and political narratives – we see metaphors as a sort of technology.

Which are the next steps for the Feminist Internet?

We were founded in 2017 at the University of the Arts London. We started out as a 10-day educational experiment with 16 students, whose brief was to write a Feminist Internet Manifesto and prototype creative responses to issues of gender inequality and the internet. Since then we have been around the world giving talks, running workshops and teaching people about how feminist values can improve inequalities as they relate to the internet.

We are now in the process of formalising our structure – setting Feminist Internet up as a non-profit company, and separating out our consultancy services that face towards business.

We are hoping to develop our first piece of Feminist Internet Technology – a feminist chatbot by the end of the year. We have prototyped something, but we are ambitious about where it could go. You can check out the F’xa at f-xa.co

We are looking for support to continue the podcast as well, and will continue to build our teaching capacity and online presence.

Interview: Sol Polo