As the scale and severity of our multiple environmental crises come into view, the question of digital technologies and how they can be designed sustainably becomes even more pressing. The starting point for this brief commentary is that technology is not just a neutral instrument to achieve sustainability but takes an active part in shaping what sustainability means in the first place. Digital technology, in other words, not only has material consequences but mediates the meaning of sustainability and takes part in the creation and dissemination of sustainability imaginaries: collectively held beliefs about the world and how to act on it in a sustainable manner. On this background, I argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a new sustainability imaginary that stands on three pillars: ontological entanglements, premised in the observation that everything is connected and could only be fully understood through those connections; inclusive epistemologies, rejecting the reductivism of Western rationalism in favor of “othered,” more situated forms of knowledge; and a politics of mutuality and care that mobilizes generosity and reciprocity as the basis of social life. I make use of several digital technologies to illustrate how these ingredients lend themselves to new digital sociotechnical practices that, in turn, may shape how we think about and pursue sustainability.

This paper considers the design of Augmented Reality experiences that allow the interrogation of multiple temporalities, in order to foster engagement with More-than-Human worlds. While Augmented Reality has traditionally been used to layer different spatial contexts onto the physical environment, we explore its potential to visualize alternative temporalities, offering users unique ontological perspectives on time and its role in shaping interconnected human and non-human futures. Drawing from futures studies, experiential futures, and speculative design, we examine how Augmented Reality’s capacity to represent temporal layers can deepen understanding of More-than-Human interdependencies. We report on a pilot experiment where participants engaged with an Augmented Reality experience, analyse their reflections, and propose design insights for integrating Augmented Reality into speculative design practices.

Speculative design is an emerging form of critical material engagement with possible futures. Designers working speculatively call attention to current and future sociotechnical dilemmas, and aim to provoke debate about the moral, political and ethical implications of sociotechnical innovation. Despite the popularity of speculative design and its presence in a variety of domains, there are very few resources that address it as a pedagogical practice. We attempt to fill this gap by presenting the structure, reasoning and outcomes of a graduate course on speculative design we taught during the academic year 2022-3. The article describes class activities and outcomes, discusses the benefits and challenges of teaching speculative design (especially in a design-engineering program), and concludes by identifying the most considerable obstacles awaiting those who want to integrate speculative design into the curriculum. As such, the article provides a useful resource for those interested in understanding the benefits of speculative design as a critical pedagogical practice, and for those who wish to bring that understanding into the classroom.

This essay considers the meaning of criticality in design futures education. It identifies three such meanings – criticality as an indication of importance, as a style of reasoning, and as attentiveness to power – and argues that the latter is most suitable for seeding transformative change. By drawing connections between critical pedagogy and critical futures studies, we aim to chart a path through which design futures education can potentially grapple with the political, contentious aspects of future-making.

Time is a crucial element in design, and even more so when it comes to designing for sustainability. Many designers approach sustainability from a problem-solving perspective, according to which time is linear (and therefore quantifiable) and the future is predictable (and therefore designable). Designerly time appears quintessentially modern and human. A welcome antidote can be found in more-than-human design perspectives, where a multitude of actants and agencies and their appropriate temporalities are given consideration and space. In this paper we add to such approaches by exploring in practice two ways to engage with more-than-human temporalities: noticing and care. We illustrate how these approaches may give way to new design practices by discussing the conceptualization and construction of a music festival stage in France. We argue that such design practices integrate ecological care into the design process by attuning the designer to the different scales and rhythms of ecosystems and their more-than-human members.

Civic tech, also referred to as digital civics in HCI, designates efforts to use technology to bring together citizens, bring governments closer to citizens, or improve public service infrastructure. Such sociotechnical encounters are meant to address public needs and increase interactions and information flows between citizens and/or authorities. In this sense, they represent efforts to bolster democratic participation and oversight. Yet, despite the importance of these goals and due to their inherent complexity, civic tech initiatives are often discontinued, leading to a considerable loss of public investment and energy and contributing to a sense of failure. To be sure, this is a global phenomenon: While civic tech initiatives emerge at different places in the world, they are often confronted with the same or very similar impediments. But because of the sense of failure felt by those involved, there are few opportunities to openly discuss discontinuation. Events and academic conferences dedicated to civic tech often foreground short-term success stories and published research papers, and so HCI practitioners and researchers miss opportunities to consider long-term perspectives and slower, ongoing (democratic) transformation processes. What we suggest here, therefore, is that failure and discontinuation should also be seen as productive learning opportunities.

Against the background of continuous calls to democratize futures research and practice, this paper reports the results of a systematic literature review of the involvement of publics in participatory futuring processes. The paper considers three key research questions: Who participates in public futuring processes? Why are publics included in these processes? And what roles do they occupy? By considering practices of participation in futuring, we aim to build a comprehensive picture of the participatory futuring landscape and highlight elements of process design that may enhance or diminish a process's democratic potential. We conclude by suggesting directions for possible future research that could serve the field's continuing desire to democratize and further integrate participatory and critical approaches to futuring.

Materials form the basis of modern technological society. The extraction and processing of raw matter and the disposal of material things is at the heart of most of the environmental and social crises, and has important implications for the design and deployment of computation systems. In this paper, we present an analysis of the way in which materials are selected during the design process: how designers determine whether a given material is fit for purpose. While originally addressing specific functional or aesthetic purpose, with increasing urgency designers have begun to select materials that also consider a broader environmental purpose (eg. CO2 footprint) or ethical purpose (eg. Fair Trade). The analysis also unveils a missing category: the need to consider the social relations that emerge in the creation of materials across their supply chains. Fit for political purpose is thus proposed to create a bridge between the nuts-and-bolts material design of technology and the socio-political impacts of its production.

The design of civic tech is often confronted with impediments, barriers, and a lack of resources. These and other causes may lead to the discontinuation and even abandonment of initiatives. Since seemingly failed projects are much more difficult to publish as articles, this workshop will provide academics and practitioners with a rare opportunity to exchange experiences and insights on discontinued civic tech initiatives. The goal of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of why some civic tech initiatives fail and ask whether discontinued initiatives may still somehow contribute to social change and the growth of digital civics. A variety of sub-questions around discontinued civic tech will be addressed in the workshop, including matters of participation, citizen science, public management, power structures and biases, and communication.

The Sensing in the Wild Lab is a speculative experiment in designing a de- centralised urban sensing system from a more-than-human perspective. It is part of DCODE, an H2020-ITN project that explores the future of designing with AI. During the Lab participants assume different identities – roleplaying as children but also as moss, as municipal authorities, as CCTV cameras, as pigeons, and as undocumented immigrants trying to evade the authorities – and are asked to feed into the sensing system data that reflects their particular perspectives and interests. The data partici- pants share, in the form of an image and text uploaded to a dedicated WhatsApp channel, helps to reveal both frictions and alignments among actors. In this, the Lab offers municipalities an opportunity to shift their thinking about the future smart city from a “system of systems” that is optimised for a few city dwellers to a much more distributed, inclusive meshwork in which data is contributed, circulated, and negoti- ated by humans and nonhumans alike.

This chapter suggests a few touchpoints between Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism and current work in critical design, with the hope of initiating a productive dialogue between the two. Taking Feenberg’s notion of the design code as an invitation for such an encounter, the chapter illustrates how designers can take an active, meaningful role in facilitating what Feenberg calls “democratic rationalizations” in three different ways: in (co)design processes designers facilitate collaboration and nurture collective creativity while maintaining as much autonomy for participants to make the design process and its outcomes their own. In (re)design processes designers may be forced to respond to their users’ needs post-hoc, but they may also anticipate users’ needs and even embrace opportunities to provoke users to reflect on the social, cultural and political implications of the technologies they use. Lastly, and most radically, (un)design processes ask designers to let go of (some of) their intentionality and seed potentials for users to appropriate the technologies they design. In Feenberg’s terms, this equals an almost complete relinquishing of “operational autonomy” and the valorization of technical rationality that characterizes it.

While often seen as an elitist practice found only in artistic and academic circles, speculative design has grown in popularity and is now practiced in more diverse contexts and with a variety of participants. In order to gain a better understanding of this ostensible 'participatory turn', this paper presents an initial exploration of participatory speculative design based on a pilot survey of recent projects. Using a sample of projects we develop an 8-step hierarchical taxonomy of participation in speculative design that moves from 'spectatorship' to 'reflection', 'inspiration', 'generative reflection', 'shared creativity', 'shared authorship', 'initiative' and, finally, 'ownership'. The taxonomy helps to raise important questions about the character and outcomes of participatory speculative design processes and the role played by designers as agents of the public imagination.

Moving into the social and public sector, service design is becoming both more complex and more participatory. This is reflected in the greater diversity and interrelatedness of stakeholders and the wicked problems being addressed. However, although many service designers working in the social and public domains bring into their design practice the intention to make design more participatory and equitable, they may lack an in-depth understanding of power, privilege, and the social structures (norms, roles, rules, assumptions, and beliefs) that uphold structural inequality. In this paper we present findings from seven interviews with service designers to investigate the challenges they face when addressing power issues in design, and their experiences of how power shows up in their design process. By drawing from understandings of power in social theory, as well as the interviewees’ perspectives on how power manifests in design practice, we outline a framework for power literacy in service design. The framework comprises five forms of power found in design practice: privilege, access power, goal power, role power, and rule power. We conclude by suggesting that service design practices that make use of reflexivity to develop power literacy may contribute to more socially just, decolonial, and democratic design practices.