Putting the ''Black'' in Black Mirror: Ethical Speculation via Design Fiction from Black Women and Femmes

Black Mirror, a science fiction anthology series, explores potential future consequences of technology and serves as a familiar site for ethical reflection. However, speculative fiction narratives like these, as well as the tech industry that is often responsible for those futures, may also neglect the perspective of historically excluded people, including Black women and femmes. We facilitated design workshops using the ''Black Mirror Writers Room'' ethical speculation exercise to explore how this community envisions and critiques technological futures. Drawing from Afrofuturist design principles, we present their episode pitches as a design fiction anthology that surfaces themes of survival, resistance, and re-imagined technology, while using counter-storytelling as an allegory for social justice issues. In doing so, we show how participants used ethical speculation both to critique existing systems and to envision liberatory alternatives, and the potential of this approach to expand who participates in designing and imagining technological futures.