Sustainable Futures

Emerging digital technologies play a pivotal role in shaping everyday practices and global sustainability. However, green digital technologies continue to the designed as one-size-fits-all solutions, removed from the situated contexts where they are supposed to matter. We address the urgent need for alternative approaches to designing and imagining digital, green futures.

Through the lens of sustainable futures, we explore and design computational technologies with people in their local communities and everyday life. As we face futures where access to shared environmental resources such as energy, mobility, water, and food become scarce and will change how mundane everyday practices. we research the co-design of emergent digital technology through experimentation in everyday sites and social practices to bring forth alternative and inclusive futures.

Drawing on disciplines of participatory design, software development, design anthropology, and human-computer interaction, our ambition is to foster social change together with people to shape long-lasting collective transformation. Projects are relevant for researchers, organisations, and stakeholders interested in new knowledge and opportunities. While experimenting with computational technology, we embrace the situated social and cultural aspects of everyday life in shaping alternative, sustainable futures.

Contact

Rikke Hagensby Jensen

Associate Professor

M rhj@cc.au.dk
H 5347, 141
P +4587150035

Rachel Charlotte Smith

Associate Professor

M rsmith@cc.au.dk
H 5347, 037
P +4526171840

Ongoing Projects

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.

Sustainable Futures

Responsible AI in Namibia

Namibia’s political visions for inclusive and Responsible AI towards prosperity for its citizens and environment, is a unique Afrocentric case with potentials for generating alternative AI futures if successful in bridging deep digital divides, conflicting cultural values and inequalities. The project advances decolonising research on artificial intelligence (AI) in Namibia towards more human and sustainable AI futures based on local values, ethics and knowledges. It explores technology research and codesign with diverse Ovahimba and San communities in Namibia can align with situated lifeworlds, epistemologies and knowledges to demonstrate how policy visions of responsible AI might look like in practice. RAIN is a collaborative project with UNESCO Chair of Digital Technology Design with Indigenous Communities, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST).

Sutainable Futures

The Social Life of Algorithms

This project traces the entanglement of algorithmic values and everyday life by exploring and mapping how residents of the Salvadorian coastal town of El Zonte perceive the top-down transition of the town into "Bitcoin Beach". These value-based technologies are creating transformations that impact diverse aspects of material culture and built environment in the local community. Our approach advances empirical and design anthropological research on the impact of algorithms by acknowledging the myriad ways in which those who won’t or can’t (afford to) interact with algorithmic technologies are impacted by the outcomes of their programming and provides novel insights for critically examining the role of computational values in shaping sustainable futures.

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. DCODE is a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN), of seven world-class higher education institutions working with stakeholders from industry, government, and civil society. The project addresses the knowledge gap for future design practices between technology design and the governance of the societal systems in which these technologies are embedded.

Selected Publications

Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of key themes and agendas in contemporary Participatory Design across diverse disciplines, continents, communities, and practices. Building on Participatory Design’s core values of empowerment and democracy, the handbook explores how the field is developing and diversifying to address contemporary societal challenges in a global community.

Smith, R. C., Loi, D., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Huybrechts, L., & Simonsen, J. (2024). Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design. Routledge.

Towards Pluriversality: Decolonising Design Research and Practices

The promotion of Western epistemologies, one-size-fits-all technologies, and the often unquestioned transferability of design methods to diverse contexts, continues to suggest the idea of universality of design. Yet, contemporary challenges of social injustice, economic inequality, political instability, and ecological crisis pertaining to worldwide concerns, urge the design and tech communities to address aspects of power, equity, inclusion, and decoloniality in technology design research and practices.

Smith, R. C., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., De Paula, R. A., Zaman, T., & Loi, D. (2024). Towards Pluriversality: Decolonising Design Research and Practices. CoDesign, 20(1), 1-13.

Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities

In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.

Jensen, V. V., Laursen, K., Jensen, R. H., & Smith, R. C. (2024). Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-17.

Extending Temporalities in Design: Designing Pluriversal Futures

This article addresses the challenges of designing pluriversal futures in complex and contested sociopolitical contexts by extending the temporal scope of design to address future imaginaries. Opening up spaces in which difficult colonial ‘pasts’ can be addressed alongside everyday narratives and memories of marginal voices also opens up possibilities for imagining and designing otherwise.

Kambunga, A. P., Smith, R. C., & Winschiers-Theophilus, H. (2024). Extending Temporalities in Design: Designing Pluriversal Futures. CoDesign, 1-19.

Past Projects

Sustainable Futures

Design Ethnographic Living Labs for Future Urban Mobility

The AHA II project addresses key urban planning challenges around the research and design of future mobility services (MaaS) that target transport of people and goods the first and last mile in urban areas. Based on results from the AHA proof-of-concept project, AHA II creates a participatory and co-creative Living Lab methodology to involve communities and citizens in the design of a digital mobility service based on social values and integrated city use. It also creates a concept for Mobility Hubs from a human-centred perspective. The project delivers a transferable human-centred approach to exploring and designing future scenarios, prototypes and concepts of MaaS digital services that are integrated into city planning.

Sustainable Futures

Future Urban Mobility: A Human Approach

The AHA project develops a human-centred interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder methodology for co-designing future urban mobility services. People are at the centre of our agenda for the future. We have a responsibility to design for future lives, not just for future technologies and future cities. This focus helps us to understand people beyond being simply citizens (a cities focus) or technology users (a technology industry focus) to instead understand ourselves as People, with our everyday lives, our routines, jobs, social relationships with others, dogs, cats and everything else that makes up the complexities of real life. Many people live in cities and use transport, but neither cities nor transport define our lives.

Revised 12.04.2025

Rikke Hagensby Jensen