Connected Life 2022: Designing Digital Futures

About

Amid a global pandemic, an international recession, and a war in Europe, conceptualising digital futures may easily paint gloomy images of people isolated behind their screens, monitored by ubiquitous state surveillance systems and flooded with misinformation. Fragmentation, power asymmetries, deep fakes, algorithmic bias, security and privacy concerns, hate speech, and dark patterns dominate technological and political discourse, with very few instances of solution-oriented, let alone utopian reprieve. Design in all its iterations – from the infrastructure of the Internet to the virtual architectures which constitute our imagined communities, legislative frameworks, and data ethics – swims against this doomsday current with practice-based research and conceptional reimaginations. At Connected Life 2022, we give alternative ways of thinking about, designing, and participating in digital futures centre stage. Through keynotes, panel discussions, art exhibits, and networking spaces, we provide multiple avenues of engagement with the topic of Designing Digital Futures.