Provocation #1: Slowing tech down, letting solidarity in

Slow tech design, the way we practice it at CGHR, is about making time and space for solidarity. Indeed, this turns tech design into an act of solidarity.

As we previously explained, solidarity is about the communicative exchange of ideas and emotions, values and goals, and trust and credibility, towards a shared commitment to each other. Solidarity is care at the community level, and tends to be neither efficient nor easily scalable. Solidarity in tech design is fundamentally about collaboration with constituencies who interact with the technologies, both as users and because the technologies have implications for their contexts.

The profit-centred values of mainstream technology design stand in stark contrast to solidarity. The philosophies of agile methodologies and the mottos of ‘move fast and break things’ and ‘scale or die’ have little patience for the slow practices that underpin solidarity in the design process. So, to provoke, how can we make room for this solidarity in tech design?

A methodology and a horizon

In CGHR’s vision, slow tech design is both a methodology and a horizon. As a methodology, it represents ways of thinking, creating, repairing and using technology that enable thick and sustained communication. It departs from methodologies aimed at adapting human interactions to the pace of technology and looks toward developing technology based on human needs and visions. Slow tech design understands the frictions that emerge in technology design and use not as obstacles but rather as opportunities to engage with others, to explain, to listen, to reflect and to negotiate and collaborate.

As a horizon, slow tech design aligns with calls for degrowth rather than endless growth; for repair and maintenance rather than innovation and endless product development; and, more broadly, for what Ivan Illich called ‘conviviality’ and the re-tooling of society rather than ‘growth mania’ and ‘imperative to scale’. It goes without saying that slow tech design is ethical design, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene.

Slow tech design in praxis

Our interest in slow tech design grows out of our side-by-side work with practitioners, activists and community organisers. Whether we are talking to community radio practitioners, human rights fact-finders or digital rights advocates, we hear the shared frustration that dominant digital platforms do not help them to advance meaningful dialogue.

We also witness a shared appetite for new and radical approaches to technology design for mediated communication.

The Whistle

Slow tech design has been a core principle in our work at The Whistle, an academic tech start-up that supports social change organisations in their collection and analysis of digital evidence from the grassroots. The Whistle’s team members and partner organisations experienced ambivalence regarding the possibilities afforded by existing technologies. For example, a recurrent question was how to reduce extractiveness and increase opportunities for solidarity when gathering data from digital witnesses.

Partner organisations did not share the enthusiasm of ‘high tech’ optimists, but neither did they embrace the view of ‘no tech’ pessimists. Instead, they wanted to de-centre technology from the design process and, after having identified their own concerns and priorities, find out whether and how technology could help achieve their goals. Slow tech design, which shifts the emphasis from product to people, provided an excellent framework for putting such an approach into practice.

Africa’s Voices

We realised in our discussions that led to this Provocation that Africa’s Voices, a CGHR spin-out non-profit based in Nairobi, Kenya, had also adopted a slow tech design approach to address similar concerns when designing tools to facilitate, understand and amplify audience participation in interactive radio shows. On this occasion, a relevant goal was to envisage technologies capable of including citizen voices in all their complexity, including expressed in local languages and SMS ‘text-speak’. Placing value on open communication necessarily entails enabling human interpretation, i.e., the active process in which parties express their subjectivity as speakers and as listeners or researchers.

Africa’s Voices design team worked closely and patiently with those most intimately involved in the interpretive process, so as to build tools to enable their valuable interpretive work. This approach differs wildly from big data solutionism, which deploys automated systems in the name of real-time and actionable insights from ‘processing’ or ‘parsing’ raw data. In contrast to this mathematical pattern-matching from aggregated abstractions of actual lived expressions, the time-consuming and cognitive-intensive processes of human interpretation, facilitated by slow tech design, made space for pluralism in the co-construction of knowledge.

Digital Rights Activism

Slow tech design provokes attention to a bigger horizon. In contrast, rapid technological change can immediately and continuously disrupt and affect the wellbeing and agency of activists and human rights advocates working in the field of technology.

For example, some digital rights activists in Latin America have realised that the effort required to evaluate and catch up with a rapidly evolving industry is hindering their capacities to sustain what is in reality a long-term fight for autonomy over the production and use of their data. The constant launch of new products and features, and the subsequent constant revelations that these products and features often involve problematic practices (recently seen with ChatGPT’s reliance on the moderation of traumatic content by minimally-paid workers), is highly distracting.

Playing the catch-up game and navigating ethical mazes can preempt defining and enacting long-term goals, as well as the pursuit of other key priorities such as strengthening community ties and addressing internal power dynamics.

Designing tech, slowly

We conceive of slow tech design as a condition for the deliberate embedding of local values into technology, especially ones that challenge the dominant epistemological, political and profit norms underpinning data-intensive technologies.

By slowing down technology design and technology-mediated communications, citizens’ voices can emerge, political plurality can flourish and community ties can be cultivated. Slow tech is about caring for communities, including the wider communities and environments in which the technologies will be deployed.

Slow tech design is particularly well suited to grassroots communities and organisations for whom advancing just and inclusive worlds requires sustained engagement with other individuals and groups.

Moreover, slow tech design can profoundly transform both the process of technology design and the resulting technologies, opening up possibilities for envisioning organisational and governance models based on pluralism and solidarity rather than competition, efficiency and exploitation.