Public Lecture

This will not be Tidy: Planet-Centric Design and finding Socio-Technical Alternatives

What kind of societal transformation is needed to address climate breakdown and how can technology support it? Rather than focusing on individual tools, I consider the role of digital technologies in our lives and ask what narratives for the future they are feeding. Change will accelerate. To cope, we require an inclusive, flexible, creative approach to life together.

It is therefore urgent to rethink our structures of engagement as well as the deployment of our technical skills. Technological developments bring an emphasis on scale, consistency, hierarchies and smart management, but are these qualities that can and should transfer into our new cultures as we manage consumption-oriented lifestyles and mitigate the extinction event we are living through?

I will share examples of alternative structures and discuss how these visions of a different world have led to eco-social use for networked technologies to challenge and resist dominant values. I will draw on two of my recent projects that co-created designs for transformation - Creative Practice for Transformative Futures (CreaTures) and Social Justice in the Digital Economy (Not-Equal) and look forward to work to come.

About Ann Light

Ann Light is Professor of Design and Creative Technology, University of Sussex, UK and Professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmö University, Sweden. She is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making. Her research has focused on the politics, ethics and agency of design, and especially co-design in communities, exploring social activism at neighbourhood level, investigating the design of sharing structures and questioning the boundaries of participation. Regarding the social, technological and ecological as inextricably linked, over the last few years she has turned to consider climate collapse and the stress that current systems put on the planet, believing creative remaking of relations is needed for liveable futures and looking at ways that socially engaged art and design can find potential in difficult places and offer visions of fairer worlds. She is co-creator of the CreaTures Framework, prepared as part of the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures, she recently completed work on Social Justice in the Digital Economy, a UK platform for research into more equal societies, and has two new EU projects starting this year, on ReWorlding and Bauhaus of the Seas.

About Current Trends in Computer Science

This lecture is part of the Current Trends in Computer Science Lecture Series by the TU Wien Informatics Doctoral School, where renowned guest professors hold public lectures every semester.

If you are studying with us, the lecture series can be credited as an elective course for students of master programs of computer science: 195.072 Current Trends in Computer Science. Additionally, you can join courses held by this year’s guest professors of our doctoral colleges and the TU Wien Informatics Doctoral School.

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