Designing "right things" for climate justice: Vandana Shiva on tech that serves nature and humanity
I will never forget seeing Dr. Vandana Shiva speak to a group of faculty and students on my college campus over a decade ago. It wasn’t just that it was the largest crowd I’d ever seen gathered on the campus. It wasn’t just that it was the most diverse gathering (diverse in gender, age, race, and I’m sure other less visible social locations).
It may have been in part because it was a sight still far too rare: a woman of color on a stage, with an audience fully attentive and rapt. It was definitely also because of the way this woman, after a fairly short period of time, had made everyone in the room feel. In a word: hopeful.
This may be surprising to those of you who know who Dr. Vandana Shiva is. She is a brilliant scientist and scholar who is frankly unafraid of talking about the many horrors of our time, from environmental degradation to gender oppression to the impact of globalization on impoverished people.
Vandana’s teachings cross the invisible-but-profound boundary between naming these harms and living into solutions, specifically in a democratic, collective way. Building upon the previous entry about Joanna Macy, this entry is about the power of honoring the pain of these harms, and how doing so is critical to creating technologies that serve nature and humanity.
Designing the “right” things
In an interview with her on the for the wild podcast, Vandana talked about how based on her interdisciplinary studies in science, technology and policy, she uses the following questions to assess technologies:
Do I really need it?
How does it compare to existing alternatives?
Does it have any risks and hazards?
How does it serve nature? And how does it serve society?
In her book, Two Futures of Food, Health, and Humanity, Vandana uses these questions as she takes a critical look at patents for technologies that propose to serve people.
“Nanoparticles in our blood. Necessary? No.” she says. “Better than alternatives? Not compared to all the vitamins we have. Risks? Huge, unknown. They haven’t even been assessed. And do they improve nature and society? No. They will create new diseases for which the same companies will have new miracles and new technological fixes.”
She also assesses artificial breast milk produced by a lab, which has been suggested as an alternative to formula. “Is it necessary? No. All we have to do is make it easier for mothers to have situations where they can go away to breastfeed their babies. Superior? No. Risk assessed? Not at all. And does it improve the wholesomeness of our bodies, of the baby's health? We know for sure, the reason the baby food, the movement against baby food, the lactogen chain, and the fabricated food was so strong, is because the evidence was there that this causes harm.”
As climate designers, we have the opportunity to not only consider how we design products, services, and/or systems, making sure that it’s done in the “right” way, but also to consider whether those things are even worth designing in the first place, whether they are the “right” things.
I realize that the field of design is evolving, that in many cases designers may not be at the table when ideas surface or get funded. Personally, I choose to confront this challenge by asking myself what tables I want to be at, even if I’m a late joiner. I choose not to work on products, services, or technologies that I deem to be hazardous or even risky, which in these still-nascent days of tech, unfortunately, includes many, many technologies.
Tech that serves nature and humanity
Let’s be honest: it’s hard to assess risk and harm. This is why it’s not sufficient to do assessments based purely on our own personal experiences, perspectives and beliefs. Vandana challenges us to honestly assess the technologies we are designing in a way that is aligned with climate justice principles and practices.
“Societies must have choice. If assessment through democratic process, and choice through democratic process, and fully informed consent are missing, then you are moving very quickly into the use of tools as dictatorships. Technology then becomes the tools in the hands of the masters, rather than the tool at the service of nature and humanity,” Vandana says.
“Violent power has taken away our capacity to live and think, through creative power in nonviolent form,” she continues. “This is the kind of power that the young people marching on climate change need to reclaim. Not to march because of panic, but march because you love the Earth so much, that you're not going to let anything come in the way of preventing actions that are harming the Earth, whether through extinction, or climate change, or the pandemic, or any of the other existential crises we face.”
This is the power that created hopefulness in that room I was in, years and years ago, that lifted that large, beautiful crowd of people from a feeling of despair to a sense of confidence that I felt could move mountains.
As climate designers, we have so much creative power, sometimes too much, and too often taken for granted. We too need to reclaim a love that is resolved.
Dr. Vandana Shiva
I remain inspired by Vandana’s words and her spirit. I am hopeful about what is possible when we face all the crises and horrors and threats with open eyes and hearts, as she suggests.
From this hopeful place, I now consider it to be essential to my design practice that I embrace her other urging: That I not face these pains alone, in my personal creative corner. I think it’s critical to bring questions about necessity, risks and benefits to the “public square,” to the extent that I’m able.
It’s one thing to interview customers, it’s another thing to do the research needed to understand systemic impacts. The latter is much more difficult, especially since technology is transforming the public square, and not always in the most fruitful of ways.
What has worked for me is to learn from people like Vandana who have deep knowledge of systems, and also to learn from the underestimated people who are the most likely to be impacted. This is deliberate, ongoing work that for me often falls outside the 9 to 5 timeframe and mindset. It might seem hard, but it is also the only way we can ensure our creations are indeed in service to the Earth and all her creatures. For me, this is well worth the effort.
In the next entry in this series on what I've learned from women "elders" working on climate justice, I will share about another approach that can help climate designers ask questions that are not meant to assess harm but rather to envision what technologies are worth imagining and exploring to begin with. Stay tuned.
So, call-to-action time
Head over to the Climate Designers community space on Mighty Networks and let us know what thoughts this entry inspires! Have you ever had the opportunity to stop and think about if what you are designing is the “right thing” for the situation at hand? Make sure to check out more of Dr. Shiva’s work and be on the look out for the next entry in this series!
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This entry was written by
Lydia Hooper
Lydia Hooper is a hybrid professional with special expertise in communicating about complexity, facilitating collaborative design processes, and guiding teams through transformation. She works as a UX Designer in the civic tech sector. Lydia is an active member of the Design Justice Network Communications Working Group, a collaborator on All Tech is Human's Guide to Responsible Tech, and co-author and editor of The Authoritative Guide to Designing Infographics. You can learn more at www.lydiahooper.com.