Sustainable Digital Life

Living in the Digital: Digital Literacy

Sustainability is about valuing the users digital rights:
• producing appropriate contents for different age groups and
vulnerable users
• developing possibilities for users participation and engagement
• promoting users freedom of expression

Sustainability is about promoting digital literacies

among users, including their critical awareness in
digital cultures.

See more about Children's Rights in the Digital Age, Unicef Office
of Research-Innocenti:
https://www.unicef-irc.org/research/child-rights-in-the-digital-age/

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 Sustainable Digital Life

What are Digital Digital Literacies are multiple skills as understanding, interpreting
Literacies? and creating of the digital media as, for example:

References:
• Awareness of technology; skills in problem definition;
Buckingham, D. (2015) ’Defining digital literacy. What
do young people need to know about digital media?’ abstraction; understanding of algorithms, patterns and
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 2006-2016, p. 21-34. straightforward logic of computers (Kotilainen et. al., 2021)
Kotilainen, S., Okkonen, J., Vuorio, J., Leisti, K. (2021)
‘Youth Media Education in the Age of Algorithm-driven
Social Media.’ In Frau-Meigs, D., Kotilainen, S.,
Pathak-Shelat, M., Hoechsmann, M., Poyntz, S. (eds.) • Ecological media critics is about seeing media and ICT, the
The Handbook on Media Education Research. Wiley
Blackwell. gadgets, i.e. technology in a critical light from environmental
perspective (Lopez, 2021).
Lopez, A. (2021) ’Expanding Ethics to the Environment
with Ecomedia Literacy.’ In Frau-Meigs, D., Kotilainen,
S., Pathak-Shelat, M., Hoechsmann, M., Poyntz, S.
(eds.) The Handbook on Media Education Research.
Wiley Blackwell. • Media critics of the global role of advertising, promotion and
sponsorships (Buckingham, 2015)

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Living in the Digital: Digital Ethics

• What is goodness of digital
technology (in moral sense)?
• What kind of ethical challenges current
information and communication technologies
introduce?
• Why should technology developers care about
ethics and philosophy in general?

This section aims to make you think about why

ICTs exist in the first place and how to think More about the topic on

about quality in a broader way

Sustainable Digital Life
courses “Sustainable
Design”

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Digital Ethics
What is it and why is it necessary?
Our (digital) lives are significantly shaped by various information and
communication technologies. They help us to communicate and make sense of
the world but can also make us addicted and narrow-minded.
• Ethics is necessary because laws and regulations are not enough to ensure good
conduct. Especially as there are very few laws regulating ICTs, our digital lives are at the
mercy of technology developers and designers.

Digital ethics studies the challenges related to the information society and era of
high digitalization. For example:
• Unethical computer systems might discriminate against certain individuals or groups of
individuals in favour of others (Friedman & Nissenbaum 1996)
• Privacy, surveillance, digital rights
• Lack of transparency in how algorithmic decision-making works
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Much work on ethics has taken place under biomedical areas, perhaps due to the
stronger ethical foundations in the practice of medicine. The field of information and
communication technology is missing much of this history and professional practices.

Reference: Friedman, B., & Nissenbaum, H. (1996). Bias in Computer Systems. ACM
Transactions on Information Systems, 14(3), 330-
347. https://doi.org/10.1145/230538.230561

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Living in the Digital:

Diversity, Normality, and Disability
• Shortly put, diversity denotes “abandoning . . . universal standard[s] for bodies and
cultures and acknowledging that there isn’t one regnant or ideal body or culture—that
all are in play concerning each other and should be equally valued.” (Davis 2014)
• Normality/the normal can be defined as a category or standard of widely accepted
agency and demeanor that is enforced in and through culture. Historically, it has its
roots in ”the rise of eugenics, statistics, and certain kinds of scientific claims about the
human body, race, gender, class, intelligence, strength, fitness, and morality.” (Davis
2014)
• Disability is often 1) medically defined as a (mostly) permanent state of physical,
mental or psychophysical deviance and 2) socially as a related ”master status” rather
than a single, temporally and spatially changing element of identity. (Barnartt 2010)

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Living in the Digital:

Diversity, Normality, and Disability
• While living in and envisioning the digital, the above aspects of diversity, normality,
and disability become further problematized through digital interactions and the
ethical questions they engender in relation to
- medical and social diagnoses (the diagnostic worldview), i.e., principles of
measuring, identifying (e.g. symptoms of disability) and treatment;
- equal rights for participation and access as well as related obligations;
- social stigmata and fetishes related to, e.g., disability (such as those of coping,
miracle, struggling, compensation, and empathy) and
- compulsory able-bodiedness and -mindedness, i.e., the social, economical and
technological diagnoses of able human performance that spectacularize disability
and render accepted functional capabilites and features into invisible norms.
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 Sustainable Digital Life

Service Design
•Using design thinking, methods
and tools on services.
•A way of seeing things as means
for providing services.
•A holistic approach that includes
many stakeholder groups and
their needs and interests.
•Not a method, but a mindset. Nina Hautala, 2020

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Service Design for Sustainable Digital Life

•Participation by many parties and many voices
•Ideation for new sustainable services
•Improving existing services to become sustainable
•Rapid prototyping to test the ideas
•Creation of sustainable key performance indicators to
measure and promote the ideas
•Knowing how to transfer fruitful ideas to implementation
by others

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Digital Ethics
Traps of Technical Interventions (Selbst et al., 2019)
The authors present 5 “traps” where technical (algorithmic) solutions can fall:
• The Formalism Trap: “Failure to account for the full meaning of social concepts such as
fairness, which can be procedural, contextual, and contestable, and cannot be resolved
through mathematical formalisms”
• The Ripple Effect Trap: “Failure to understand how the insertion of technology into an existing
social system changes the behaviors and embedded values of the pre-existing system”
• The Framing Trap: “Failure to model the entire system over which a social criterion, such as
fairness, will be enforced”
• The Solutionism Trap: “Failure to recognize the possibility that the best solution to a problem
may not involve technologyӬ
• The Portability Trap: “Failure to understand how repurposing algorithmic solutions designed
for one social context may be misleading, inaccurate, or otherwise do harm when applied to a
different context”
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Many algorithmic systems are based on humans and algorithms collaborating and
interacting. Often, decision-making should be understood as the mutual product of
automated processes and discretionary human action.
• Algorithms can basically have two roles: automating or supporting human
decision-making → decision support tools/systems.
• AI application categories by Davenport: Cognitive process automation,
cognitive insights, cognitive engagement (Davenport, T. H., & Ronanki, R.
(2018). Artificial intelligence for the real world. Harvard business review,
96(1), 108-116.)
• All sociotechnical systems, even when designed to mitigate biases, are
designed with use cases in mind that may not hold in all scenarios

Algorithmic power has a longstanding literature on organizational decision-making

but it has the limitation of being geared mainly to deal with cases of fully automated
decision-making where human discretion plays little role
• They consider the machine learning model, the inputs, and the outputs,
and abstract away any context that surrounds this system. (Selbst)
• For instance, the Facebook newsfeed or Google PageRank algorithms are
examples where automated technology replaces more traditional editorial

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 work in deciding what information should be displayed to user

Reference: Andrew D. Selbst, danah boyd, Sorelle A. Friedler, Suresh

Venkatasubramanian, and Janet Vertesi. 2019. Fairness and Abstraction in
Sociotechnical Systems. In FAT* ’19: Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and
Transparency (FAT* ’19)

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Gamification
•Gamification as making experiences more game-like either
to simply enjoy them more, or to drive specific user
behaviors
•Broadly, to understand what gamification is and can be, we
can divide it into two types: intentional and emergent
• Intentional gamification is presented in, for example, adding game elements into
non-game contexts (achievements, goals/questes, competitions, etc.)
• Emergent gamification is less palpable and takes form in cultural
transformations towards more playfulness in "serious" contexts (for
example, convergence of play and work such as with streamers)

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 a) Gamification can be used to teach
Gamification and about sustainability and encourage
sustainable behaviours
sustainability b) Gamification approaches may be
intersect from unsustainable long-term in certain
contexts
multiple c) Gamification can be, intentionally
or unintentionally, used in such a way
perspectives so as to aid in exploiting vulnerable
populations
d) A combination of some, or all of
the above

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Envisioning the Digital: Sustainable Design

• What does sustainability mean in the practice of

designing digital technology?
• Do technology developers have a responsibility
for the humankind?
This section aims to make you think
about how ICTs could be envisioned, designed,
and developed in new ways—such that we take
into account the important aspects of ethics,
diversity, and sustainability. More about the topic on
Sustainable Digital Life
courses “Sustainable
Design”

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Sustainable Design
Goodness of design
“Good” design has traditionally implied skill in the quality of craft (e.g.,
usability, user experience, aesthetics, cost of production, return of investment)

How about “good” in the sense of moral outcomes (good vs. evil) and
sustainability?
• We rarely consider the long-term implications: how might today’s digital choices
be seen differently in the future, and are they still valid solutions then?
• Traditional approach to problems in design thinking: see a problem → solve the
problem → leave the problem
• As individual designers and as a professional community, we need to improve
our skills in ethical consideration and anticipating long-term implications

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Now here’s the link to Digital Ethics. Morality of technology is something that should
be considered as a key quality attribute when designing new solutions.

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Sustainable Design
So, what’s wrong with present-day design?
As a profession, design and development of digital things…
• values speed → tendency to follow design trends and conventions and to copy
ideas from successful products → produces more of what we already have
• “Move fast and break things” – Mark Zuckerberg’s (Facebook) alleged motto
• tends to mix up the way things are, the way things are desired to be, and the
way you want things to be
• tends to overemphasize the perspective of the individual user, ignoring other
stakeholders and the society as a whole – let alone the planet Earth
• is strongly incentivized by the global market economy and organizational “key
performance indexes” → importance of creating revenue, often with the cost of
ignoring other aims, such as the SDGs

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The traditional way of looking at production of digital things, especially in Silicon

Valley: have a big idea → test → fix the identified issues → iterate (i.e., refine) → test
again... This generally works well in software design. However, applying this to very
complex systems (like human beings, communities, or societies), the big idea has to
be much clearer before it ought to be tested.

• How things are (status quo): user research looks into this and tends to make
conclusions that that’s also how things should be.
• How things should be: theories on ethics and morality, as well as legislation and
declarations of human rights, etc. deal with this question. However, it’s really hard
to establish a consensus due to the plurality of values.
• How you want things to be: calls for personal reflection of one’s values,
assumptions, and aspirations. Consider this in your own case: are your desires
closer to the status quo, some ethics theories, other people’s opinions, or
something else?

Individual user vs. society:

• Optimizing the experience of an individual vs. a community vs. the human kind:
currently the focus tends to be only on the first.

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• For example, Uber is great for the individual customer, while much hated by local
governments, labour unions, and of course the current taxi businesses.

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Sustainable Design
Sustainable visualities
Humans are usefully understood as organisms which have created
culturally meaningful relationships with their environments.
• Human vision plays an integral part in how these relationships unfold, since
the ability to see has gained an important role in designing environments.
• Digital devices and infrastructures are part of these environments, allowing for
novel and different kinds of ways of being together, in terms of distance,
temporality, scale, and scope.
• Screens, cameras and graphical user interfaces are examples of visual media
used for doing so.
• The success story of computing would look very different without the use of
visual media.
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The traditional way of looking at production of digital things, especially in Silicon

Valley: have a big idea → test → fix the identified issues → iterate (i.e., refine) → test
again... This generally works well in software design. However, applying this to very
complex systems (like human beings, communities, or societies), the big idea has to
be much clearer before it ought to be tested.

• How things are (status quo): user research looks into this and tends to make
conclusions that that’s also how things should be.
• How things should be: theories on ethics and morality, as well as legislation and
declarations of human rights, etc. deal with this question. However, it’s really hard
to establish a consensus due to the plurality of values.
• How you want things to be: calls for personal reflection of one’s values,
assumptions, and aspirations. Consider this in your own case: are your desires
closer to the status quo, some ethics theories, other people’s opinions, or
something else?

Individual user vs. society:

• Optimizing the experience of an individual vs. a community vs. the human kind:
currently the focus tends to be only on the first.

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• For example, Uber is great for the individual customer, while much hated by local
governments, labour unions, and of course the current taxi businesses.

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Sustainable Design
Sustainable visualities
Design of visual media, in order to be sustainable within the cultures
and environments built for, should account for the broader contexts it
is embedded in, paying particular attention to issues such as:
• Role of vision in the cultures and environments built for vis-à-vis other sensory
modalities.
• Relations of seeing (Who is allowed to see whom in which ways?)
• Ways of structuring the seen (What kind of imagery is used to focus attention,
how is it presented for the visual field?)
• Temporality of images / visual media (Which features are relatively fixed, semi-
fixed and which mobile?)
• The role of invisibility (What is left out and on which grounds?)
Introduction to Sustainable Digital Life MOOC 4.2. Sustainable Design 18.6.2021 | 16

The traditional way of looking at production of digital things, especially in Silicon

Valley: have a big idea → test → fix the identified issues → iterate (i.e., refine) → test
again... This generally works well in software design. However, applying this to very
complex systems (like human beings, communities, or societies), the big idea has to
be much clearer before it ought to be tested.

• How things are (status quo): user research looks into this and tends to make
conclusions that that’s also how things should be.
• How things should be: theories on ethics and morality, as well as legislation and
declarations of human rights, etc. deal with this question. However, it’s really hard
to establish a consensus due to the plurality of values.
• How you want things to be: calls for personal reflection of one’s values,
assumptions, and aspirations. Consider this in your own case: are your desires
closer to the status quo, some ethics theories, other people’s opinions, or
something else?

Individual user vs. society:

• Optimizing the experience of an individual vs. a community vs. the human kind:
currently the focus tends to be only on the first.

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• For example, Uber is great for the individual customer, while much hated by local
governments, labour unions, and of course the current taxi businesses.

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Sound studies and Sound Design – Steps Towards Sonic Sustainability

Sound and hearing effects everyone. The

study of sounding and listening practices
within the multimodal practices provides for
understanding how individuals and groups
negotiate spaces, a complex web of norms
and values around which social life
ecologies are formed.

Sonic sustainability recognizes the diversity

of ways that sound influences accessibility
(who can do what) and social equity. It
highlights the complexity of ways how sound
affords interaction.

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 Sonic The concept of auraldiversity arises from the
sustainability can observation that everybody hears differently.
The assumption that we all possess a standard,
be studied through undifferentiated pair of ears underpins most
listening scenarios. But this is demonstrably
incorrect. We may well ask: whose ears are
the concept of standard? Whose ear has primacy, also in
digital environments
auraldiversity. • Auraldiversity considers both physiological
and social/cultural aspects of diversity.
• It examines audio-social predeterminations
(sonic orders, which have become
conventions) and sonic orders.

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Gamification
•Gamification as making experiences more game-like either
to simply enjoy them more, or to drive specific user
behaviors
•Broadly, to understand what gamification is and can be, we
can divide it into two types: intentional and emergent
• Intentional gamification is presented in, for example, adding game elements into
non-game contexts (achievements, goals/questes, competitions, etc.)
• Emergent gamification is less palpable and takes form in cultural
transformations towards more playfulness in "serious" contexts (for
example, convergence of play and work such as with streamers)

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 a) Gamification can be used to teach
Gamification and about sustainability and encourage
sustainable behaviours
sustainability b) Gamification approaches may be
intersect from unsustainable long-term in certain
contexts
multiple c) Gamification can be, intentionally
or unintentionally, used in such a way
perspectives so as to aid in exploiting vulnerable
populations
d) A combination of some, or all of
the above

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Accessibility
• Accessibility does not mean usability
(something can be accessible, but not
usable).
• Usability is essential to making
technology to work for everyone, while
accessibility addresses aspects
that concern discrimination and
inequality supporting social inclusion.
• Accessibility easily becomes a feature
of the physical environment, but today
it is also a feature of digital content.
• A key aspect is incorporating real
people in design (and understand who
is the user, the nature and impacts of
the impairments, and the activity
limitations).
Picture: Sergio Palao / ARASAAC (Papunet)

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Accessibility &
Sustainability
Accessibility contributes to
social sustainability. In
practice, we focus here on
accessibility of digital
services.

Task: please familiarize with

the terms in the figure!

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 Sustainable Digital Life

Voice interaction
• Voice interaction has similar
features and benefits to support
sustainability as audio in general.
• Most importantly, voice interfaces
can be used efficiently to make
digital services accessible for many
people who would not be otherwise
able to use them.
• This includes people with special
needs, including e.g. illiterate
people.
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 Sustainable Digital Life

Visual Design
•How we can convey meaningful visualizations from the huge
amount of data available to us to support decision making
and more sustainable services?
•Can we create accessible visualizations to cater for everyone?

COLORS CONTRASTS ALTERNATIVE

TEXTS
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