What is it about?
This article brings together Fat Studies and the work of Fat Liberation to HCI and digital design scholars. The article explains how Anti-Fat bias is a way of discriminating against people and harms those whom it marginalises. It questions how current HCI work understands fatness and finds that there is a significant trend towards reductive thinking around weight in digital design. Finally it suggests some ways forward to increase design justice to incorporate fatness.
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Why is it important?
The need to understand body weight in a nuanced way is increasingly being recognised by health bodies such as the American Medical Association, including recognition that body weight isn't necessarily controllable and focusing on controlling weight can have significant harm. Yet technologies largely focus on weight loss, tracking and control in their design, and we, as HCI practitioners, need to catch up!
Perspectives
As a fat person trying to navigate a digital world that is designed to make me smaller, I am excited to bring this perspective to HCI scholars more widely and hope that I can contribute to a shift in thinking about weight and design for weight tracking. My key takeaway is for readers to consider how weight is a smokescreen for so many other types of bias and harm, so without challenging and changing our practices in HCI about weight, biases such as ableism, racism, and classism will continue to invade digital spaces!
Aisha Sobey
University of Cambridge
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Conceptualising Fatness within HCI: A Call for Fat Liberation, May 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642199.
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