Hello All!
We are Caroline Sinders and Natalie Cadranel. Together, with funding from NDI and the Open Technology Fund, we created this online, open source curriculum focusing on how to center human rights throughout the research, design, and development processes. It’s called the Human Rights Centered Design Curriculum and builds out an accessible, teachable methodology based on the Secure UX Checklist created by a variety of researchers, activists, designers and security experts: Sage Cheng, Natalie Cadranel, An Xiao Mina, Matt Mitchell, TTCat, Max Anderson, and Martin Shelton, with contributions from Caroline Sinders and Soraya Okuda.
If you'd like to get involved or stay in touch, please contact us!
Natalie Cadranel is an archivist and ethnographer working at the nexus of human rights, design, and technology. She is the Founder and Executive Director of OpenArchive, an experienced research and development organization dedicated to the ethical collection and long-term preservation of mobile media. Using participatory research methods and co-design, she created ‘Save’, a free, open source, mobile-to-archive preservation ecosystem, which ethically collects and preserves media captured by groups at risk of persecution and censorship. OpenArchive seeks to protect its communities – and their media – from efforts to chill free speech through content takedowns, privacy breaches, and data loss, while preserving it for legacy access.
Natalie complements her work with a strong theoretical background, having earned a Masters of Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a BA in International Relations from UC Davis. She was also a 2019 Stanford PACS’ Digital Civil Society Lab fellow and currently serves on the board of Common Frequency.
Caroline Sinders is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, systems design, harm, and politics in digital conversational spaces and technology platforms. She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google’s PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), Ars Electronica’s AI Lab, the Weizenbaum Institute, the Mozilla Foundation, Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, Telematic Media Arts, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Wired, Slate, Hyperallergic, Clot Magazine, Quartz, the Channels Festival, and others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Darren Clarke is a full-stack developer living in Berlin. He works with civil society groups to counter disinformation and censorship and to promote digital security and privacy.
Amira Dhalla has spent over a decade in technology working on issues related to digital rights, privacy, and equity with global organizations and communities. Together, she works with educators and activists to design participatory curriculum and resources to make emerging technology more inclusive, open, and safe. She currently works at Consumer Reports as the Director of Impact Partnerships with a focus on digital rights and security.
Roxy Zeiher is a graphic designer living and working between Berlin, London and Zurich. Particularly interested in critical and contemporary subject areas communicated through design, she pursues a multi-disciplinary creative practice. She interrogates culture with her research-driven design practice that investigates how the designed world, especially new technology, is shaping our behaviour, perception and understanding.
Alex Esenler is a data and database nerd who is passionate about knowledge sharing and building systems that amplify impact, improve workflows, and facilitate collaboration. She’s been active in the digital and human rights, media and democracy, and communications spaces for nearly a decade through work with mission-oriented organizations such as Global Voices, the Center for Global Communication Studies, and Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent projects include Global Voices’s Civic Media Observatory which uses deep qualitative analysis from local researchers to increase understanding of what is going on in regional media ecosystems. She holds a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors in History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Vani Chitkara is a web developer, UI and graphics designer, and an aspiring software developer. She has interned with Microsoft as Software Engineer Intern and with OpenArchive as a communication team intern through the Outreachy open source internship program. She is an active member of several tech communities. She has led the Google Developer Student Club at her university and has volunteered at several initiatives that support and uplift the women in tech. She has been a student fellow at the Reboot Student Fellowship-a fellowship based on the intersection of tech, humanity, and power. Her interests lie in technology, reading, and writing.
The Human Rights Centered Design Curriculum is a practical introduction to applying human rights centered design to your workflows. It will take you through the process of centering human rights in your work at each stage of the design → development process. This includes sharing emergent best practices for: building trust with communities, performing co-research, ideating, co-designing, iterating, and developing and launching a project, tool, or service.
Our work was made possible by the Open Technology Fund and the National Democratic Institute. This was written in 2021 by Natalie Cadranel and Caroline Sinders, Darren Clarke is the web master, Roxy Zeiher designed the site, Amira Dhalla was the senior editor, Alex Esenler was the editor, and Vani Chitkara was the content manager.
The Human Rights Centered Design Curriculum is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA or Attribution-Noncommercial/ShareAlike