Building better digital futures: sustainability, equity, and co-design justice, Dorothea Kleine
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Recorded on 23 June 2025
About the talk
What digital futures do we want to live in? Who decides our digital futures? In this talk, Dorothea will introduce her work operationalising the capabilities approach as a normative framework to judge the degree to which a specific digital innovation is liberating or disempowering.
Drawing on recent work, the talk highlights the entanglement of capabilities expansion with climate justice and environmental limits. The discussion will start at the scale of global systemic dependencies rendering the current dominant model of digitalisation environmentally unsustainable and frequently socially unjust. Drawing on her recent co-authored book, Digital Reset, Dorothea will present key principles for a better digital future.
To illustrate the challenge of concrete co-design of digital innovation along the lines of these principles, Dorothea will discuss recent work with marginalised groups as co-designers in South Africa, carried out in collaboration with South African colleagues. The talk will reflect on ways in which principles of regenerative design and equity need to be embedded in not just outcomes but also processes of digital co-design.
About the speaker
Dorothea Kleine
Director, Institute for Global Sustainable Development
Dorothea Kleine is Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Sheffield, where she leads the Digital Technologies, Data and Innovation (DDI) group. She is a Professor of Human Geography and her research investigates sustainable human development, global justice, and the role of digital technologies in making progress towards these aims. She has published widely on the potential and the ethical challenges of digitalisation in sustainable development in both the global South and North, focusing in particular on the perspective, agency and creativity of the more marginalised. She is well-known for her theoretical work applying the capabilities approach to digital development.
Dorothea combines conceptual and international policy-level work with ongoing empirical research, including participatory action research and co-design. She has undertaken research in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. She was the Founding Chair of the Digital Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Dorothea Kleine holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was based in both the Geography and the Media and Communications departments.