Design for existential crisis in the anthropocene age

What should be our orientation to the socio-technical as climate predictions worsen; ecological crises and wars escalate mass migration and refugee numbers; right-wing populism sweeps through politics; automation threatens workers' jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it is not "business as usual" and even broken concepts of progress seem no longer to be progressing? We ask how to design for the common good, focusing on human needs for meaning, fulfillment, dignity and decency, qualities which technology struggles to support but can easily undermine. We juxtapose the design of computing that offers hope with that which offers only distraction, propose four modes to design for (being attentive, critical, different and in it together) and conclude with a plea to avoid tools that encourage a blinkered existence at a time of great uncertainty and change

Ecological footprint and governing the anthropocene through balancing individualism and collectivism

ISSS proceedings are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.The current way of life is unsustainable (Papadimitriou, 2014) and in a bid to maintain the status quo – profit is extracted from people and the environment. The challenge of scaling up efforts to engage people in an alternative forms of democracy and governance is that currently the response to social, economic and environmental challenges is that internationally politics is being shaped by so-called realist politics (Beardsworth, 2011) based on a) competition for resources, b) the notion that profit and loss, win and lose is contained /carried by ‘the other’ and c) Huntington’s ‘clash of cultures’ thesis rather than an understanding of our interlinked, co-created and co-determined fate

Design for Existential Crisis

What should designers do with their design skills and orientation to the future as right-wing populism sweeps through politics; climate predictions worsen; mass migration (within/across countries) escalates refugee numbers; new classes of automation threaten workers’ jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it isn’t “business as usual” and even broken concepts of progress seem no longer to be progressing? In this paper, we discuss aspects of humanity, such as the need for meaning, fulfillment, dignity and decency, which computers struggle to support but can easily undermine. We juxtapose design that offers hope with that which offers only distraction and conclude with a plea to avoid Bovine Design, or tools that encourage passivity, rote-behavior and a blinkered existence at a time of great uncertainty and change. The big question that alt-chi can ask for 2017 is: What is good design for existential crisis

The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity