The Making a New Reality project, which Dot Connector is producing in collaboration with Kamal Sinclair, published a seventh issue that addresses designing for justice in emerging media. In the feature piece, Sinclair presents a number of design principles established by leaders in the discipline hailing from organizations like Colloqate, Algorithmic Justice League, Allied Media Projects, AI Now Institute, and Coding Rights.

In supplemental articles Sinclair discusses:

• Models for democratizing design. She encourages designers to “be collaborative with communities wrestling with any particular social or environmental ill to unlock the intelligence and creative potential that is often undervalued.”
• How computer programming languages are a new form of literacy that need to be promulgated to the larger population. She points to a number of activists who aim to share best practices on what we all need to know about technology.
• Establishing journalistic standards for new media platforms like VR.
• Perspectives on creating interventions for emerging media so public accessibility is cemented in new platforms. “Whatever the model, it must be nimble enough to evolve in real-time, and have resilience when it experiences failure.”
• And lastly, the need to break up echo chambers and silos. Sinclair emphasizes “Finding ways to strategically interject content that reflects a wider diversity of thought into those media silos might help to diversify understanding of other points of view.”

Sinclair’s project is supported by the Ford Foundation’s Just Films program, with additional support from the Sundance Institute. Each month Immerse publishes the lead article from the series. Interested in learning more? Here’s a how-to-guide on way to get involved in the discussion.