Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopticon and the Trouble with "Design"

This paper argues that designers committed to advancing justice and other non-market values must attend not only to the design of objects, processes, and situations, but also to the wider economic and cultural imaginaries of design as a social role. The paper illustrates the argument through the case of Turkopticon, originally an activist tool for workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), built by the authors and maintained since 2009. The paper analyzes public depictions of Turkopticon which cast designers as creative innovators and AMT workers as without agency or capacity to change their situation. We argue that designers' elevated status as workers in knowledge economies can have practical consequences for the politics of their design work. We explain the consequences of this status for Turkopticon and how we adapted our approach in response over the long term. We argue for analyses of power in design work that account for and develop counters to hegemonic beliefs and practices about design as high-status labor.