Which Humans? Innovation, Equity, and Imagination in HCD
CHI 2021 Keynote: Ruha Benjamin
Abstract: From patient care to online learning, human-centered design addresses a variety of issues with research and tools that can help us better understand our world and ourselves. But without careful consideration for the social dimensions of innovation, we risk reinforcing longstanding forms of inequity and injustice, and even producing new forms of discrimination and exclusion. In this talk, Ruha will examine a range of technologies used in education, healthcare, employment and more, and present conceptual tools we can use to think about the social values embedded in our research, pedagogy, and designs.
Biography: Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press). She has studied the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine for over fifteen years and speaks widely on issues of innovation, equity, health, and justice in the U.S. and globally. She is also a Faculty Associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy; Program on History of Science; Center for Health and Wellbeing; Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies; Department of Sociology; and serves on the Executive Committees for the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities. Ruha is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2017 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. She is currently working on her next book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, born out of the twin plagues of COVID-19 and police violence—a double crisis that has since created a portal for rethinking all that we’ve taken for granted about the social order and life on this planet.
Posted: May 12, 2021, 1:19 PM