On Design and Creative Identity

Painting, sketching, and graphic design are the visual representations of my own personal reflections on my life. And as I came into my own identity, visual representations such as clothing, physical appearance, and even makeup helped me identify who I was from the outside in, using aesthetics to communicate pieces of my personality, my history, and my priorities. I fixated on figures with Afros, Black features, and cultural symbols to affirm my identity while feeling isolated in a predominantly White space. I created homemade posters to pay homage to artists and writers that had similar beliefs and advocated for themes I strongly identified with. Looking back, I understand how visual art helped me navigate a world in which I was othered through personalization. Now, I use visuals, mediated through design, to understand others alongside myself.

However, this visual understanding of myself was not circumscribed to the physical world. I can name places on the internet that I found myself, that I found community in as a young Black woman. These spaces were not escapes but rather tethered to real-world experiences. YouTube creators taught me how to care for my curly hair when transitioning from the chemical relaxers that many in my immediate familial circle preferred. Tumblr threads allowed me to interact with other Black fantasy readers, especially of the Percy Jackson fandom. I felt as if mainstream fantasy audiences (and the casts of source material) were not catered to Black women, but my timeline, a curated version of my own interests, was filled with fan art, stories, and retellings of my favorite characters in real-life situations that were more like my own. I bring this up not to suggest that this was some type of DEI internet utopia; in fact, these works were the result of what I suggest is more similar to excavation. The required effort to find these works often meant putting in tailored search queries such as “how to detangle Afro hair,” “hairstyles for Black girls,” and “what is the best shampoo for Black hair.” Interacting with spaces such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and YouTube sometimes was frustrating as they assumed that Blackness was an Other to be specified.

This experience draws me to Noble’s work in Algorithms of Oppression, in which she argues that “[o]ur ability to recognize these challenges can be enhanced by asking questions about how technological practices are embedded with values, which often obscure the social realities within which representations are formed. The interface of the search engine as a mechanism for accessing the Internet is not immune, nor impartial, to the concerns of embedded value systems” (Noble 2018, 147–148). Engaging with this work leads me to ask more questions of how, even when working against the flattening algorithmic interface of the search engine, and extendedly other social media platforms, users are able to still find sites of congregation, shared identity, and interest. I argue that marginalized users excavate the internet to build out their own spaces.

It is easy to see the work that Black, and other marginalized, users do to create a tailored and relevant space on the internet as unexamined and therefore neutral forms of agency and community building; however, this work is not often recognized as labor. Positioning internet excavation as labor is complicated when we consider the way internet spaces are growingly, if not already, the primary space in which we market ourselves and our services, promote businesses and other public interests, and attempt to reach a wider circle to benefit ourselves in some real, tangible, and often monetary way. If marginalized users are put into this role of excavator in which they are not algorithmically pushed out to a wider audience than the assumed default and instead required to build from scratch, we can see this community building as a double-sided coin of algorithmic oppression. Here, Noble helps me think of how technology can be an institutional space in which users perform labor to create community within this space.

In a similar way, borrowing from Koopman’s ideas of infopower, we have language to understand the unique way technology both categorizes us as users and how actual people behind the user show signs of resistance toward the user as a subjugated agent of the technology it uses. “As information technologies of check box–clad printed blanks, filing systems, processing protocols, and computational analytics played an increasing role in American life from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, they began to assume the functional exercise of what I have been calling infopower. We today are not only brave new citizens confronting a newborn world of digitized data—we are also legacies of a power of information that has been constructing our subjectivity for almost a century now” (Koopman 2019, 154–155). What I want to know is how people are using technology to actively resist the ways in which it subjugates us, and how I, as a designer, can assist in this way. I want to know how marginalized groups are excavating, finding each other on the internet even amidst the display of infopower that technological platforms exert. Even thinking broadly at class relationships, people are using interfaces like Facebook Marketplace, intended to sell items, as a means to an end to give out what they don't need, using an e-commerce interface for no-buy transactions and community engagement.

I argue that as a designer, I have an imperative to engage with sociopolitical identity and excavation and metabolize this knowledge formed directly from intracommunal spaces in order to inform the future of technology alongside its users.

Personally, my work in community engagement allowed me to learn from the lives of others with hands-on experience. The Saint Louis Land Use Plan (also known as the SLUP) allowed me to speak with St. Louis residents in order to understand the way they are interacting with land around their residencies and identify what the future of their spaces should look like. My role, however, was to listen. As community facilitator, I had the opportunity to lead sessions that followed this overarching structure: neighborhood members would walk in, acquaint themselves with the room, glance over the snacks provided, and talk amongst themselves. Seeing that the sessions were organized by relative neighborhood (South City, Benton Park, The Ville, etc.), this meant that the “users,” in this case the residents, were either already familiar with each other or were able to quickly create connections due to similar pain points, observations, and/or concerns. After the official city planner gave an introduction to the SLUP, we moved into small groups that all met around a large poster-sized map view of the specified neighborhood. From here, I provided general questions surrounding the density of common intersections, lot vacancies, and so forth, but besides these questions, I did not do most of the talking. The residents spoke one by one, bouncing off each other with questions, remarks, and contradictions, and my job was to write everything down as notes—not to sway the conversation in any specific direction, resolution, or make any changes.

I found that my positioning as a non-native St. Louisan made people more comfortable with explaining the way things are in their neighborhood and offered a perspective in which inside knowledge was brought out of residents due to necessity since I lacked the knowledge they had from their lived experience. Lloyd, in the third chapter of her book Networked Black Resistance, draws strong conclusions and theoretical frameworks of Black internet usage by using similar methods. “Focus groups were ideal in that they allowed me to frame the conversation but then step back and allow the participants to theorize and articulate care for themselves. I wanted to understand the back-end strategizing about care that we might not see solely from what ends up as online posts” (Maragh-Lloyd 2024, 71–72).

In my work in this program specifically, I want to push this idea forward not just by engaging in focus groups of those in similar lived communities like neighborhoods. I want to acknowledge that my past work with the SLUP primarily worked with residents of homeowning status, whose concerns, while valid and important to their lives, are not my primary focus of interest as a technologist. I want to know how people talk amongst themselves in the technological built environment. What are the neighborhoods that people find themselves staying in online? And how are they, if applicable, simultaneously building and maintaining that online space, as well as being subjected to the larger structures that host internet interactions? Lloyd affirms this, saying: “I have argued elsewhere that talking to users behind their online posts can be illuminating in understanding absence online (Maragh 2018; Maragh-Lloyd 2020b). Because various sociopolitical contexts necessarily intersect with users’ behaviors online, I employ focus groups in this chapter to be able to understand the women’s full lives, both on- and offline”(Maragh-Lloyd 2024, 71–72). I align myself with this thinking because I experienced this same kind of discovery as I listened to the stories of the city. I learned insights that might not have been the focus of our workshops but were important nonetheless. Frustration with disinvestment, greed in development, and lack of access for St. Louisans with disabilities were implicit stories that I heard, beyond the scope of our intended discussion around zoning. This type of immersive and personal research sticks with me as a real example of ethnography. Ethnography, a qualitative methodology in which an individual truly immerses themselves in the lives of others to better understand their social, political, and behavioral societies, is a form of storytelling—a type of writing that has ignited my imagination since childhood—and, when done correctly, creates a sense of empathy and calls to action.

Focus groups, as Lloyd suggests, work into this qualitative method of research and provide a unique space to study social interactions online through social interactions in person, creating another area to note reactions, attitudes, and motives that are not legible through characters on a screen or short-form video clips. My area of interest lies in the idea that identity and “sociopolitical contexts,” as Lloyd suggests, are key motivators in the way that users use the internet and, more broadly, technology as a whole. Focus groups provide a methodology to have nuanced and safe discussions of identity and thus can inform me as a designer of the landscape of how groups use technology that I hope to create.

As a designer, engaging with this scholarship sets the scene to investigate how users are excavating technology. Noble provides concrete ways in which the algorithms of technology, specifically the simple search bar, position technology as an institution and push me to question how users are living, working, and playing within the technological space. Koopman’s concept of infopower gives language to talk about the ways in which users are siloed and categorized and ultimately othered, providing context to what users are up against in the technological regime. Finally, Lloyd provides useful methodologies of focus groups to move forward and qualitatively understand how users—online and offline—are operating within the institutional place of technology through excavation.