SASUF Sustainability Forum 2024

Digital technology, such as AI and ChatGPT, are often approached as drivers of change, leading us into the future. This change is often feeling overwhelming as ordinary people, users of these digital tools and systems, are trying to keep up with all the digital innovations that keep popping up. But what if we turn this around and start with the role of people, their everyday lives, routines, and socio-cultural contexts when trying to understand both contemporary digital technology development as well as when imagining and foresighting tomorrow's digital tech? This workshop will focus on users of digital technologies, tools and systems, their everyday lives and socio-cultural embeddedness. By bringing in ordinary users of digital technologies in both Sweden and South Africa (both literally and metaphorically) in this workshop, inviting participants to imagine and foresight the digital technologies of tomorrow, we introduce a method of how tech development may become more just, transparent and not the least sustainable, in the future.

The theoretical foundations of this workshop stem from critical data studies, the sociology of imaginations and storytelling. Methodologically, the workshop draws models of collaborative foresighting and ethnographic futures.

Assuming that every workshop participant is a user of digital technology, the workshop will be centred around their stories of their own situated uses of digital technologies. After a short introduction to the workshop procedures, its theoretical and methodological foundations, participants will be divided into smaller groups. We aim for around five participants in each group and we will ensure group diversity in terms of perceived age, gender and of course that every group is composed of both Sweden and South Africa based participants. People/ users seldom do what they are told to or use digital tools and systems exactly as intended. Digital technologies fail to deliver on users’ expectations. Digital tools and systems break and need repairing. This is not done in a vacuum. Digital technologies are adopted into and adapted to fit users' everyday lives, societies and cultures. Undoubtedly, digital technologies transform users’ everyday lives, societies and cultures. But also vice versa: the socio-cultural context(s) that users are situated and embedded in, will influence how digital tools and systems are used and developed. The workshop is organized with this in mind.

The first part of the groupwork will entail participants sharing stories of innovative, surprising and unintended uses of digital technologies, for example when handling tools and systems that fail or do not live up to their promises or users’ expectations. Are their similarities and/or differences in these stories regarding for example gender, age and geographic location? And why might this be so? In the second part of the groupwork, participants are invited to depart from these stories when imagining a better digital tech future, to play around with and think about future scenarios. The grand finale of the groupwork will entail the formulation of a number of foresights. The workshop is concluded after each group has presented their foresights to the other participants.

PLENARY
Welcome 10 min
Principles and rationale of the workshop 10 min
Theoretical and methodological foundations 10 min
Division into groups 5 min

GROUPWORK
Sharing of stories from each participant 25 min
Scouting and understanding similarities and differences in the stories told 20 min
Foresight formulation: What can these stories, their similarities and differences, tell us about the future use of digital tech? 20 min

PLENARY
Presentation of foresights 10 min
Discussion of foresights presentet 10 min

Keywords: Digital Technologies, Change, Foresight, People