DIGTCOM Centre for Digital and Green Transformation in Cities and Communities

Sustainable Futures

Participatory AI for Alternative Sustainable Futures

Emerging AI technologies are designed based on Westernised values, principles and models of prediction that challenge local participation, agency and empowerment. Addressing the urgent need for humanistic research to drive technological innovation and green transitions, the P-AIA project develops design anthropological approaches to explore and co-design decolonising forms of AI based on diverse local values, knowledges and lifeworlds in Namibia and Denmark.

Civic Resilience

Infrastructures and Interfaces of Publics in Urban Space

InfraPublics addresses a gap between journalism studies and smart city research, taking the datafication of urban spaces as an opportunity for journalism to go beyond the “informed citizen” model of its audience. The project maps and evaluates approaches to how journalists, citizens, cities, data providers and civic tech NGOs can work together on a local level to shape infrastructures for civic communication in the connected city.

Sustainable Futures

Rethinking Design for Inclusive Digital Futures

Inclusive and sustainable digital futures call for fundamentally new design competences and practices. DCODE combines advances in engineering, social sciences and humanities to provide the necessary connection between human experience (one-to-one relations) and the societal system (end-to-end relations). In doing so, we position the crafting of agency as foundational to digital design today, just like function was critical to industrial design.

Sustainable Futures

Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design

This handbook advances contemporary research, theory and practice and highlights case studies that demonstrate how Participatory Design can bring about game-changing shifts in diverse contexts. The volume is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, scholars, and professionals who seek to utilise Participatory Design research and practice to enrich, support and transform complex contemporary conditions towards inclusive, sustainable and transitional futures.

(Smith, Loi, Winschiers-Theophilus, Huybrechts, Simonsen, eds., 2025)