Black Mirror, a science fiction anthology series, explores potential future consequences of technology and serves as a familiar site for ethical reflection. However, speculative fiction narratives like these, as well as the tech industry that is often responsible for those futures, may also neglect the perspective of historically excluded people, including Black women and femmes. We facilitated design workshops using the ''Black Mirror Writers Room'' ethical speculation exercise to explore how this community envisions and critiques technological futures. Drawing from Afrofuturist design principles, we present their episode pitches as a design fiction anthology that surfaces themes of survival, resistance, and re-imagined technology, while using counter-storytelling as an allegory for social justice issues. In doing so, we show how participants used ethical speculation both to critique existing systems and to envision liberatory alternatives, and the potential of this approach to expand who participates in designing and imagining technological futures.

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.

Despite frequent efforts to combat racism, almost no research has explored how to cultivate positive experiences of thriving Black culture on Reddit. In this case study, we surveyed users of r/BlackPeopleTwitter (BPT)--a large, popular subreddit that showcases screenshots of hilarious or insightful social media posts made by Black people (mainly from Black Twitter). Our research questions seek to understand users' motivations for visiting BPT, how they experience a sense of virtual community (SOVC) and membership in BPT, and how BPT's governance influences these experiences. We find that that users come to BPT primarily for excellent humor and entertainment, sociopolitical context on issues relevant to Black people, and/or partaking in the shared Black experience. Black users are more likely to report higher SOVC and to identify as members, whereas non-Black users are more likely to identify as guests or visitors to the community. To protect Black expression, the BPT moderation team implemented a governance strategy for verifying racial identity and limiting participation to only verified users in certain threads. Our data suggest that this policy is a contentious but influential aspect of SOVC that simultaneously constructs and challenges the sense of the subreddit existing as a safe space for Black people. We synthesize these results by discussing how: differing platform affordances across Twitter and Reddit combine to cultivate a thriving Black community on Reddit; the need for Black authenticity on an otherwise anonymous platform can guide future research in identity verification; and the limitations of this study motivate future work to support all marginalized communities online.

Incorporating ethics into computing education has become a priority for the SIGCSE community. Many computing departments and educators have contributed to this endeavor by creating standalone computing ethics courses or integrating ethics modules and discussions into preexisting curricula. In this study, we hope to support this effort by reporting on computing educators' attitudes toward including ethics in their computing classroom, with a special focus on the structures that hinder or help this endeavor. We surveyed 138 higher education computing instructors to understand their attitudes toward including ethics in their classes, what barriers might be preventing them from doing so, and which structures best support them. We found that even though instructors were generally positive about ethics as a component of computing education, there are specific barriers preventing ethics from being included in some computing courses. In this work, we explore how to alleviate these barriers and outline support structures that could encourage further integration of ethics and computing in higher education.

Inspired by previous research examining the challenges and benefits of Black Twitter (a community gathered on a platform used by Black people but not created by or for them), this design fiction presents a fictional study of a successful yet speculative social media platform named The Stoop. We envision this digital space as one that a Black woman created and a predominantly Black team designed and developed. Imagining what future online communities of marginalized people could be based on current struggles and shortcomings provides the inspiration for this design fiction. Proactively addressing content moderation, harassment, content controls, and the need for reducing appropriation while centering on the lived experiences and preferences of Black people allows this design fiction to joyfully speculate on what it can look like to get it right as a way of thinking through best practices for current technology design.

Traditional approaches to technology design have historically ignored Blackness in both who engages and conceptualizes future technologies. Design contributions of groups marginalized along race and class are often othered, and rarely considered the design standard. While frameworks have emerged to encourage attention to gender and social justice in design, little work has acknowledged evidence of the Black imaginary in this process. The current canon of design defines futuring and speculation as stemming from a narrow view of science fiction, one which does not include Black futurist perspectives. In this essay, we expand the canon of design by arguing that frameworks such as Afrofuturism, Afrofuturist feminism, and Black feminism be considered instrumental in design’s imagining of our future technological landscape. We contribute to the larger conversation of who gets to future in design, suggesting a dialogic relationship between those who conceptualize design and those who consider design’s societal impact.

The television anthology series Black Mirror uses speculative fiction about technology to comment on contemporary social issues, often exploring the ethics of current technologies. Based on the structure of that show, the "Black Mirror Writers Room" is a teaching exercise designed to help students creatively speculate about future harms and consequences of current technologies, and has been used by dozens of instructors in classes related to computing ethics and society, as well as technical computing classes. We interviewed 12 instructors in the university setting who have used this or similar exercises in their classrooms about their experiences and student reactions. We describe benefits and challenges of using creative speculation in the classroom (and beyond) for exploring ethics, justice, and related issues in computing.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a publication that offered resources for the Black traveler from 1936 to 1966. More than a directory of Black-friendly businesses, it also offered articles that provided insights for how best to travel safely, engagement with readers through contests and invitations for readers to share travel stories, and even civil rights advocacy. Today, a contemporary counterpart to the Green Book is Black Twitter, where people share information and advocate for their community. By conducting qualitative open coding on a subset of Green Book editions as well as tweets from Black Twitter, we explore similarities and overlapping characteristics such as safety, information sharing, and social justice. Where they diverge exposes how spaces like Black Twitter have evolved to accommodate the needs of people in the Black diaspora beyond the scope of physical travel and into digital spaces. Our research points to ways that the Black community has shifted from the physical to the digital space, expanding how it supports itself, and the potential for research to strengthen throughlines between the past and the present in order to better see the possibilities of the future.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a tool used by the Black community to navigate systemic racism throughout the U.S. and around the world. Whether providing its users with safer roads to take or businesses that were welcoming to Black patrons, The Negro Motorist Green Book fostered pride and created a physical network of safe spaces within the Black community. Building a bridge between this artifact which served Black people for thirty years and the current moment, we explore Black Twitter as an online space where the Black community navigates identity, activism, racism, and more. Through interviews with people who engage with Black Twitter, we surface the benefits (such as community building, empowerment, and activism) and challenges (like dealing with racism, appropriation, and outsiders) on the platform, juxtaposing the Green Book as a historical artifact and Black Twitter as its contemporary counterpart. Equipped with these insights, we make suggestions including audience segmentation, privacy controls, and involving historically disenfranchised perspectives into the technological design process. These proposals have implications for the design of technologies that would serve Black communities by amplifying Black voices and bolstering work toward justice.