Deep democratisation of technology can support a pluriverse of approaches for sustainability

Abstract

The overwhelming global dominance of modern industrialism stifles the visibility of alternative ways of being in the present and of what solutions to large-scale challenges may be appropriate. This paper describes how novel high-tech digital tools can be co-designed with people with different worldviews or ‘ontologies’ to better represent their normally marginalised understandings, and so begin to generate a pluriverse of localised pathways to address the future. To do so, such digital tools are not considered as technological artefacts but as socio-technical processes designed around local worldviews to encode alternative understandings of local issues and local knowledge into data collection and visualisation processes. We describe how the Sapelli digital mapping tool is implemented through participatory co-design approaches with Indigenous people, farmers, and agro-pastoralists. Representing different cultures and local knowledge systems in a digital third space has revealed a plurality of approaches to addressing environmental change that differ substantially from those conventionally envisaged.