How creative collaboration can reshape tech design for ecological change
A three-year research project shows how teams can deliberately embed alternative values—like interdependence and ecological thinking—into how they design and use technology together. The findings challenge the tech industry's dominant economic-focused approach and offer a practical model for organizations seeking to align their design practices with sustainability goals.
Originaltitel: Enacting Entanglement: CreaTures, Socio-Technical Collaboration and Designing a Transformative Ethos
<p>What happens when we try to enact theory in our practices of collaboration? The CreaTures project spent three years exploring the challenges of conceptualising and enacting entanglement in using creative practice to try and change worldviews towards understandings of interdependence. Acknowledging the backdrop to our work as pressing ecological breakdown, we sought to practice the cultural change we hoped to inspire. We discuss what we learnt about the socio-technical aspects of cooperation in managing entangled engagement as a methodological, as well as ontological, position. We centre this on a case study of how digital technology became a factor in both helpful and surprising ways during the project in response to the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with reflections on how taking the spatial metaphor of entanglement, rather than scale, has helped us understand agency in our work. In discussing this transdisciplinary project as part of CSCW scholarship, we hope to open a space for questioning dominant techno-economic values and show how alternative philosophy can be enacted in practice in supporting transformation to a different design ethos.</p>