Being a Digital Do-Gooder

As digital designers we are constantly being told that we have the power to change the world.

But other than repeating this over and over again in our comfortable bubble of tech meetups, conferences or self centred documentaries how many of us actually use our perceived super powers for something more than making rich companies richer, selling more shoes online or creating something like "Uber for coat hangers"?

In my talk I will look at examples of applied digital do-goodism and discuss some strategies for how we can use our skills for social good. Slides may contain traces of half baked philosophy, social romanticism, self guilt and hopefully inspiration.

How to develop meaningful digital products?

With more than 7 billion people on the planet we are living in a time of rapid change that bears tremendous opportunities, but also increasing risks. More than 3.5 billion people have access to the internet and rapidly advancing technologies fundamentally change the way we interact and connect with each other.

Nevertheless, we have mostly failed to use the full potential of these innovative technologies to solve society’s most pressing needs.

In my talk we learn how breakthrough technologies can tackle and solve exceptionally fast growing social problems globally. I will take a closer look at Ipso, the International Psychosocial Organisation that provide counseling to people from war affected countries to showcase and analyze success factors to create digital products that matter.

Cultural Differences

As we dig into the past, we can see that the foundations of art, history and language have played a large role in cultural differences within societies around the world.

As we move around the world from east to west, these cultural differences become a pillar of which each society bases much of their culture on. Gender, culture and time are all factors that play into how social differences are percieved and played out in design today, so how can we all work and design together?

Hacking China: Making as Entrepreneurial Life

In this talk, drawing from ethnographic research spanning more than six years, Lindtner traces how a grassroots movement morphed within only five years into a high-stake sociopolitical project aimed at “hacking China”, i.e. opening up supply chains, revamping modes of industrial production for entrepreneurial intervention, and training workforces as creative and flexible knowledge workers.

She examines how the project of hacking China was propelled forward through a transnational imaginary that depicts making as ideally situated to address the pitfalls of the knowledge economy.

Contributing to a line of research invested in the cultural politics of design, global innovation discourse and technology production, Lindtner unpacks how making came to be seen as an intervention into the pitfalls of neoliberal governance by simultaneously critiquing and extending its very logic of self-reliance to include ever more diverse populations.