While persuasion has often been considered an important design tool for achieving sustainable behavior, a growing scholarship is criticizing it for its narrow focus on individuals and an overarching economic worldview. This criticism is often based on the limitations of economic-rationales that many persuasive design efforts hold and cannot fully capture the values of people who reside outside the modern scientific world - especially where values originate from and are shaped by religiosity and spirituality. We join this discourse and argue that such a narrow view of persuasion sidelines the theological roots. Based on our six-month long ethnography with the Islamic communities in a Bangladeshi city, Kushtia, we describe how 'motivation' and 'habit' are built there - two of the basic components of persuasion. Drawing from a rich body of literature on the sociology of religions and theology, we highlight how Islamic values are closely tied to the idea of persuasion and reflect a vision of sustainable living. We further discuss how such a deeper understanding of religious values can help design for sustainable living and broaden the scope of CSCW literature in the various domains.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.