Abstract
This paper examines how visualising values in women’s digital labour shapes recognition and justice in platform-driven environments. Visualisation is advanced as a design-ethics strategy for surfacing and negotiating undervalued work that remains obscured in digital economies. Grounded in Nancy Fraser’s justice framework and feminist epistemologies centred on situated and embodied experience, the study positions visualisation as a means to reveal and contest structural devaluation. A three-phase ethical practice is developed: ethical narration to make hidden value perceptible, ethical prototyping to question recognition mechanisms, and ethical interaction to build collective participation in decisions about representation. Insights draw on sociological and anthropological research on Chinese women whose emotional and coordination work is routinely discounted by platform logic and gender norms. The study clarifies how design can transform visibility into shared ethical judgement and action, offering criteria for evaluating whether visualisation can rearticulate value and support more equitable participation in digital labour systems.
Keywords
Women’s digital labour, Value visualisation, Social justice, Design ethics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.664
Citation
Zhang, L., and Liu, Y. (2026) Visualising Values in Women’s Digital Labour: Design Ethics for Assembling Social Justice, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.664
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Visualising Values in Women’s Digital Labour: Design Ethics for Assembling Social Justice
This paper examines how visualising values in women’s digital labour shapes recognition and justice in platform-driven environments. Visualisation is advanced as a design-ethics strategy for surfacing and negotiating undervalued work that remains obscured in digital economies. Grounded in Nancy Fraser’s justice framework and feminist epistemologies centred on situated and embodied experience, the study positions visualisation as a means to reveal and contest structural devaluation. A three-phase ethical practice is developed: ethical narration to make hidden value perceptible, ethical prototyping to question recognition mechanisms, and ethical interaction to build collective participation in decisions about representation. Insights draw on sociological and anthropological research on Chinese women whose emotional and coordination work is routinely discounted by platform logic and gender norms. The study clarifies how design can transform visibility into shared ethical judgement and action, offering criteria for evaluating whether visualisation can rearticulate value and support more equitable participation in digital labour systems.