URL: https://www.wrecka.ge/ursulas-list/
An insightful write up of Ursula Franklin—personally, my first introduction to her and her work—by Erin Kissane. Tons of brilliant quotes that makes me want to read more of Franklin's work.
A few favorite quotes:
Toward the end of The Real World of Technology, Franklin offers a casual and unfussy checklist for evaluating public projects and funding:
Should one not ask of any public project or loan whether it: (1) promotes justice; (2) restores reciprocity; (3) confers divisible or indivisible benefits; (4) favours people over machines; (5) whether its strategy maximizes gain or minimizes disaster; (6) whether conservation is favoured over waste; and (7), whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible? The last item is obviously important. Considering that most projects do not work out as planned, it would be helpful if they proceeded in a way that allowed revision and learning, that is, in small reversible steps.
This is an uncompromising position: It refuses collateral damage. It insists on doing the very hard and often tedious work of incremental improvements across an entire system
But I can think of no better central principle for people who want to make, repair, and use better alternative systems of communication and collaboration and communion than Franklin’s tradition of justice, which works to eliminate the conditions that produce justified fear and is grounded in real understanding of those fears and the conditions that produce them. The most vulnerable people go in the center. Their real and varied perspectives—not the ones we assume they hold, or the ones that a single token representative espouses—form the boundaries of acceptable trade-offs.