Black 👩🏽‍💻 to the Future - The Power of Designing Afrofuturist Technology with Black Women, Femmes, and Non-Binary People

Black women, femmes, and non-binary people (BWFNBP) are historically excluded in tech spaces, resulting in an exclusion of their perspectives in technology innovation. To explore how this group imagines the future of technology, and how they see themselves within it, we conducted a series of speculative design workshops. We asked participants to design a future communication technology and address its benefits, harms, and strategies for mitigating those harms, all through an Afrofuturist lens. Our findings show that when BWFNBP utilize Afrofuturism as a design and speculation framework, they bring their whole selves to the futures they envision. Their past and present experiences not only inform the features of their technologies but also influence how they imagine the technology impacting their communities. Beyond a conversation about what technology could be, the participants in this study take it one step further and examine what it should be.