In an era of accelerating intelligent automation and delegated agency, this research platform connects creative technology practices, digital tool appropriation for self-expression and advocacy, and smart citizens' approaches to address an urgent challenge: developing the collective and individual capacity to control digital tools, processes, infrastructures.
Can we design experiences and systems that enable multiple manifestations of digital autonomy? What does it mean to be digitally autonomous? How can design contribute to this capacity? The platform collects and publishes resources to define how design can operate and contribute to fostering a paradigm in which a multitude of digital autonomies are capacities of people and organizations rather than a technological architecture.
A series of talks, lectures and workshops are the sources of a collective definition, while a practice-based exploration generates guidelines and patterns for grounding the concepts into applicable knowledge for designers, technologists, innovators, makers, students and policy makers working to promote a model of sovereign innovation.
This research borrows from medical ethics, specifically the evolving definition of patient autonomy and informed consent. When we shift this concept from patients to citizens in non-medicalized contexts, autonomy extends far beyond mere independence in using digital tools. It encompasses DIY and hacking practices, individual and community-generated strategies, critical interpretation of information and media for decision-making, local AI and knowledge-based infrastructures, and labs for autonomous making.
The discourse on European sovereignty is growing by looking at how to build infrastructure that is locally managed and sourced. Is sovereignty the only capacity we should look at? Should we build a human infrastructure made of distributed awareness and savviness of technological systems to genuinely control our digital environments?