Abstract
The increasingly precarious possible futures underscore the urgent need to reassess our lifestyles, consumption patterns, and interventions for the benefit of humanity, the planet, and the coexisting species. The ability to imagine radically different, desirable, and sustainable alternatives to products, services, and systems is crucial yet challenging, calling for creativity, new approaches, and methods. This paper discusses envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives and pathways toward a strongly sustainable smartphone industry. We employ the ‘plurishop’, a workshop-based method that addresses several distinct inquiries into a design program of interest, in our case, that of envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives. The plurishop was set up as a gameful, participatory visioning process. We describe the pre-plurishop activities, synthesis at the plurishop, and its outcomes. The paper demonstrates that distinct inquiries using multiple teams in a single plurishop contribute to gaining a more holistic assessment of past, present, and future smartphone alternatives.
Keywords
sustainable smartphones; alternative designs; participatory visioning; plurishop
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.799
Citation
Junge, I.,and Culén, A.(2023) Envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives: a plurishop approach, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.799
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
shortpapers
Included in
Envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives: a plurishop approach
The increasingly precarious possible futures underscore the urgent need to reassess our lifestyles, consumption patterns, and interventions for the benefit of humanity, the planet, and the coexisting species. The ability to imagine radically different, desirable, and sustainable alternatives to products, services, and systems is crucial yet challenging, calling for creativity, new approaches, and methods. This paper discusses envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives and pathways toward a strongly sustainable smartphone industry. We employ the ‘plurishop’, a workshop-based method that addresses several distinct inquiries into a design program of interest, in our case, that of envisioning sustainable smartphone alternatives. The plurishop was set up as a gameful, participatory visioning process. We describe the pre-plurishop activities, synthesis at the plurishop, and its outcomes. The paper demonstrates that distinct inquiries using multiple teams in a single plurishop contribute to gaining a more holistic assessment of past, present, and future smartphone alternatives.