Designing Machines of Loving Grace : Futuring Regenerative Digital Technologies

Instrumental in shaping the modern world, digital technologies will play a critical role in shaping our planet’s future. Technologies are never neutral however, they actively embody the profit-driven, unsustainable accelerationism of their developers. Further, society’s unchecked and untampered digitalisation is a key driver of today’s resource depletion, carbon emissions, conspicuous consumption and waste. With planetary boundaries ever closer to tipping point, how we design our technologies must fundamentally evolve. We must urgently design for the difficult, longer-term environmental implications (the risks, rebounds and defuturing) that digital technologies bring, rather than simply for their short-term, economic and utilitarian benefits. This chapter explores how a novel Regenerative Design approach can aid the transition towards a sustainable digital future. Drawing upon More-than-Human Design and Participatory Speculative Design practice and Planetarism thinking, the chapter considers how next generation technology design praxis and pedagogy can become innately resilient, appropriate and regenerative. In outlining these new sensibilities and capabilities, the chapter envisions how regenerative stewardship and adaptation can nurture deeper, more meaningful kinship and equitability between humans, their technologies – machines, data and AI – and non-humans – flora, fauna, and the planet.