Move slow and fix things: Teaching computer science majors to decode discrimination and design diverse futures

Our course, “Designing for Diversity: Anthropology and New Technologies,” teaches how and why people experience technology as discriminatory in order to guide students to imagine more inclusive futures for the design and development of new technologies. We recognized that while interest and enrollment in computer science has increased dramatically over the last five years, few courses centered on the human-user and ethical issues related to designing and building technology. We created this course as a new opportunity to engage our students interested in entering the technology industry with principles of ethnography, disability studies, and critical race, feminist, and queer theories. With these new frameworks, students pursued small research projects that would prove valuable for future software engineers and the future of technology development. By training future technologists to recognize and remedy the encoding of bias into technology, this course offers a prototype for teaching students how to envision more desirable futures for technology in relation to gender, race, and disability. In this way, our pedagogy draws on a design perspective that addresses the future as something that will be both imagined and made to be ethical and inclusive.