One point that Banks makes that I found really interesting was the comment he included about BlackPlanet, specifically, a comment left in a forum called “Triflin Personal Pages” (76). According to Banks, the forum read “Okay, I have about had it with some of these pages that are about the equivalent of Mr. T’s gold chains. Too much mess!! Does anybody feel me here” (76). Banks explains that “[t]his is a normalizing move, in which the user posting to the forum is attempting to get the group to set some expectations for page design” (76). The reason this small, but potentially very important, paragraph stuck in my mind relates back to an earlier comment Banks made about how “[r]acism is enforced and maintained through our technologies and the assumptions we design and program into them – and into our uses of them” (10). Reflecting on these two sections from Banks’ text conjointly I have to ask the question “Is there such a thing as non-exclusionary design practices?”

I ask this question because I am a little confused and thinking about it only prompts the asking of additional questions: If online interfaces are supposed to take into account both gender and racial differences, who then becomes the judge of their design? Is the judge of the design the actually users who will be using the interface, which becomes problematic for the design of web spaces intended for a mixed audience? Or is the design, as long as enough care was taken to address the issues of gender and race, a self judging organism that determines its own effectiveness until the critics have their say? Although the previous questions inevitably lead to more questions, I think the confusion I am feeling hinders on the “MR. T” comment. If the members of BlackPlanet could not agree to design standers, how can a multicultural, multigendered, and multiracial standard of design be developed? In one corner of my mind I feel it is attainable, but in the other corner I feel as if personal preference may play too much into our judgments. Additionally, standards always seem to limit the creative potentials of individual choices when it comes to design.

I don’t think I have a solution to this point of confusion yet, but I would like to hear what everyone else thinks. Do you think there is a way to produce an engaging interface design that is not offensive or exclusionary to someone?

Ps.
Here is a link to the Gees Bend quilts I mentioned in class:
http://www.quiltsofgeesbend.com/
Also, here is a link to the story behind the quilts:
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=498

I thought I might be worth mentioning, because it is another example of how non-mainstream technology is being brought into mainstream.