Digital Tools and Social Transformation Collaboration
Technology and society
Technology has the power to do many things, and we are privileged to be living in a time where technological innovations can assist us, make our lives easier and rethink the ways we go about our daily lives.
However, over the past century or so, a pattern seems to have emerged of identifying a problem (social, medical, economic, political, or other), seeking a technological solution, and ignoring early signs of new problems such solutions might create. These proliferating inventions are being resigned to the inevitability of accepting such problems and recursing for each new problem by seeking more technological solutions for each
To put it simply, we use technology to solve a problem and, in the process, create new problems, to which we attempt to apply technology to solve it again. It’s a cycle that is hard to break without approaching our technological problem-solving in a more meaningful, thoughtful, and human-centred way.
Digital innovation for constructive social transformation
There is little doubt that digital technologies are transforming the world, and therefore intimately linked to social transformation. What is needed to ensure that such innovations lead to as constructive a change as possible? The design and development of digital tools such as laptops, tablets, mobile devices, smart appliances and apps are driven by market forces and perceived needs and problems to be solved. Current design and development processes include user needs and behaviour, but do not include other social factors explicitly. Yet digital tools affect many social factors such as identity, consciousness, prosperity, health, education, agency, emotions, worldviews, values, individual and collective behaviour, social interactions, and market forces. There is no doubt that digital tools hold immense promise for improving all such aspects of social life.
Yet it seems externalizing most social factors might be an obstacle to realizing their full potential. Such an omission has also had unintended social consequences, especially on younger users of digital tools. For example, the worldviews and values of innovators and their society shape how they approach design, but neither these values – nor those of the users – are made explicit in current processes. Designers are human beings, with a sense of purpose, capacities, values, worldviews and a moral framework, and these aspects drive their design. However, current design processes externalize them. Moreover, since they are unconscious and not explicit in current processes, they impact those same aspects in the users of the tools. Examples include algorithm bias, the impact of suggestion algorithms for streaming media, and the negative impacts of social media particularly on adolescents.