Designing Feminist Chatbots to Tackle Online Abuse
Since creating our feminist chatbot F’xa, we’ve become slightly obsessed with feminist conversational interfaces, so when we were asked to run an intensive course for the Creative Computing Institute’s public programme, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to get stuck in and explore our obsession further.
So, we designed a 5-day course with a brief to:
‘Use feminist design principles to create a chatbot that addresses the problem of online abuse.’ Here’s how it went down:
Introductions
We started by exploring our Feminist Internet motto: ‘There is no feminism, only possible feminisms, there is no internet, only possible internets’, which grounded the workshop in an intersectional feminist position, which acknowledges the multiple ways that intersecting forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism and white supremacy manifest through society and, in this context, through the internet. We introduced the concept of Feminist Human Computer Interaction as well as our Feminist Design Tool, which was used during the workshop to help participants reflect on their feminist decision making throughout the process.
Next, we introduced participants to the world of chatbots from Walk with Yeshi to Feminist Wingbot, to Baby Faith — we explored what they are, and what their creative and social potential can be, especially outside of conventional commercial contexts.
Context setting
One of the features of good quality feminist technology development is strong subject knowledge and in-depth stakeholder research — getting to know the lived experiences of the people you’re designing for (or preferably designing with), and being conscious of the biases and assumptions you might be making about them. Often in design sprints there isn’t time or capacity to thoroughly research the topic at hand or conduct stakeholder research and testing. To help alleviate this, we invited four subject experts and activists who have already been working to tackle the topic of online harassment to share their insights and get us more familiar with the topic.
Seyi Akiwowo, Founder and Executive Director of Glitch, gave us an invaluable online abuse 101, explaining multiple forms of abuse in the categories of harassment, violence and surveillance. From slut-shaming to mob attacks, cyberbullying to identity theft, this is a complex area, and understanding the differences between types of abuse helped participants design for specific scenarios.
Carolina Are is a third-year PhD student focusing on online abuse in high profile criminal cases and its interaction with disinformation and conspiracy theories. She spoke about the fine line between harmful but legal content and content that is actually illegal, as well as the ways that the law is failing to keep up with forms of online abuse as they evolve.
Caroline Sinders, is a machine learning designer/user researcher, artist, and digital anthropologist obsessed with language, culture and images. She shared her ‘Diagram of Trolling’, a matrix that plots content on scales from ‘casual to serious’ and ‘harmful to absurdist’. This helped participants identify the types of content they wanted to focus on in their design process.
Azmina Dhrodia, Head of Operations and Founding Advisor for Block Party, walked us through the Block Party platform, showing how it addresses online harassment on social media platforms by empowering end-users with greater controls and filters over their online communications. We were very inspired by the concrete actions being taken in this project, and its focus on community support.
Stakeholder Research & Ideation
Armed with all the insights from our guest experts, we got started on exploring which stakeholder groups to work with — what kind of online abuse they might be experiencing, and what this experience might feel like. This helped groups formulate initial ‘how can we’ statements, like ‘How could a feminist chatbot help teenage girls tackle cyberbullying?’, or ‘How could a feminist chatbot help 18–30 year olds send hot nude pictures more safely?’
Next, participants went into a research phase, gaining further grounding and finding out more about the specific aspects of online abuse they had decided to address.
Having explored more about potential stakeholders, we went into a rapid ideation phase, working in groups to build on each others’ initial ideas. This was when the juicy ideas really started to emerge.
Next was storyboarding — helping to anchor our imagined stakeholders in an imagined scenario of use, and think through how the interaction could help them with their experiences of harassment. By this point, we had 5 strong ideas for feminist chatbots!
Chatbot personality
Now it was time to get into thinking about the personality of the chatbots — we explained that in a commercial setting, chatbot personality is an extension of a company’s brand, designed to have “the manners, knowledge, and attitude of someone you would actually hire to face your customers”. For our feminist purposes, however, personality is a chance to think about how the chatbot’s character can embody feminist principles, strengthen the purpose of the chatbot, and connect to the user in an empathetic and inclusive way. We worked through an adapted version of Google’s Design Guidelines, with added feminist check points, to establish the tone of voice for our chatbots.
“Design Tool Prompt:
A feminist approach to chatbot design means using empathic, inclusive, accessible language and images, and providing opportunities for the user to specify how they would like to be addressed. What kinds of character traits might reflect this? Remember, your character doesn’t have to ‘be a feminist’ or promote feminism.”
Conversation design
Next, we introduced conversation design as a discipline, and the role of the conversation designer as being like that of an architect or a games designer, mapping an experience that can be delivered through a conversational interaction. We used the feminist design tool to explore how feminist conversation design is distinct from more conventional conversation design:
- It considers how language/humour/tone can be an activist medium or tool
- It doesn’t try to fool anyone into thinking a bot is a human
- It understands emotional connection as a contract that should not be abused
- It is designed to respond adequately to harassment
- It uses empathic language
- It finds out how a person would like to be addressed
- It doesn’t make assumptions about a person’s gender
After a quick introduction to our chosen diagramming tool, Whimsical, we got started building draft conversation flows
Code code code
Day four was all about coding! Alex Fefegha, Head of Making at Comuzi Lab gave an introduction to HTML and CSS and got everyone building their chatbots in Glitch, a community programming environment. The challenge was to teach people how to bring their Whimsical conversation flows into a coding environment, so we could see the chatbots live. Alex taught how to change the visual elements of the chatbots, so that everyone’s creative skills could flourish.
What we made
Here are the chatbots! You can interact with them — but bear with us while we polish them up — these were coded in 2 days ❤
Womansplain
Helping people call out toxic internet culture, by Calie Calatayud, Kyoungmin Kim, and Georgia Hughes. You can chat with Womansplain here.
Pocket of Joy
Helping bring happiness to people experiencing online rudeness, Eunah Lee, Hannah Seddon, Tilly Cullen. You can chat with Pocket of Joy here.
Cyber Smart Buddy
Helps teenagers who are experiencing or know someone who is experiencing cyberbullying, by Judy Chyou and Janet Choi. You can chat with Cyber Smart Buddy here.
Ayla
A chatbot informing young women and users of social media platforms about online abuse, by Elizabeth Connor and Ipek Demircioglu. You can chat with Ayla here.
Ms Leaky Pipes
Informed, sexy, confident, safe, empowered sexting, by Ana Blumenkron and Ellie Stanton. You can chat with Ms Leaky Pipes here.
Reflections
This was an intense week, but it was an absolute honour to be in a room with a group of such curious, critical, creative and talented young people, all willing to absorb feminist methods, and take on the wicked problem of online harassment. Some final reflections on what went well that folks might want to try out for themselves:
- Starting the workshop by hearing from subject experts and those who have experienced online abuse was crucial, and we would recommend this for any design sprint tackling a topic you or your team are not experts in.
- Having a range of creative disciplinary expertise allowed some extremely visually appealing and expressive chatbots to emerge — having creatives on development teams is a must!
- You don’t need to have sophisticated coding skills to start making chatbots — we had a range of coding skills in the room, and this allowed people to teach each other and share knowledge in a supportive environment.
- Our feminist design tool allowed participants to articulate their feminist design choices, from the purpose of the chatbot to its tone of voice. The tool can be adapted for any design process — you don’t have to be making a chatbot to use it!
- Rituals create a sense of community. At the beginning and end of everyday, we form a circle and check-in with people to see how they were doing, what their expectations were and what they have learned. This creates an atmosphere of openness and goodwill, as well as giving facilitators live feedback about participants’ experiences.
We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about this course. You can check out our short video diary of the course on the Creative Computing Institute YouTube channel. If you would like a feminist chatbot course in your organisation contact charlotte@feministinternet.com.
