Meet the researchers: Design for Democracy

How can technology design can democratic values, and how can we imagine and enact alternative approaches to dominant, profit-driven technology?

As Alma Leora Cul¨¦n, professor of Informatics and leader of The Design for Democracy (Design4Dem) research group, explains: ¡°Most technologies are designed without democracy in mind. Our question is how technology might be designed to promote trust, participation, and community, rather than contribute to surveillance or exclusion.¡±

Many issues facing contemporary democracies are not inevitable consequences of technological change, but rather ?influenced by how digital technologies are designed and governed. ¡°There is plenty of research on how technology affects society and how democracy evolves,¡± Cul¨¦n notes, ¡°but far less on how concrete design decisions within technology development shape democratic values. That is the gap we aim to fill.¡±

Democratic values amongst coders

Design4Dem has undertaken a large-scale survey examining how technology designers and developers understand the relationship between technological products that they contribute to and democracy.

¡°Our results from Silicon Valley were striking,¡± Cul¨¦n explains. ¡°Some developers see democratic responsibility as ¡®someone else¡¯s job¡¯, while others actively try to reflect democratic values in their design and coding practices.¡±

A concerning finding from the survey is a limited sense agency among designers and developers.

The survey uncovered that even when tech workers are uneasy about the democratic consequences of a product their company makes, some feel they have little opportunity to influence decisions made higher up in organisations.?

In other words, tech workers in Silicon Valley often feel compelled to develop products they themselves know can undermine democratic values. In the survey, 74 percent of coders and developers said they go along with creating products that restrict people¡¯s freedom, such as surveillance platforms.

The survey results have now been published in the article ¡°A new digital divide? Coder worldviews, the ¡®Slop economy,¡¯ and democracy in the age of AI,¡± authored by Design4Dem members Jason Miklian of the Centre for Global Sustainability and Kristian Hoelscher of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

In the article, they also show how the business practice leading AI models have created a digital class divide between those who can afford AI tools that deliver high-quality information and those who must settle for ad-saturated, low-quality information (often referred to as ¡°AI slop¡±).

Cul¨¦n and her colleagues hope to build on the survey to further explore the intersection of tech development and democratic values.

¡°We aim to stimulate further research on the attitudes, framework conditions, and working conditions of technology designers,¡± she says.

Prototyping democratic design

Beyond traditional research and publishing, Design4Dem is also trialling democratic design in practice.

Cul¨¦n points to a dedicated Transformative Design course, which the group is involved in, that invites students to prototype technologies aligned with civic values. Several master¡¯s theses on democratic design already in motion, tackling issues such as conceptual proposals of democratic technology design, prototypes for new social media, methods for breaking filter bubbles, civic storytelling and designs for inclusion.

¡°Students can be quite creative when given the freedom to critically rethink how technologies relate to democratic life,¡± she says.

Building coalitions in and beyond academia

The group has also run several ¡°futuring¡± workshops that bring researchers, designers and practitioners together to explore design opportunities. ¡°These have already inspired new ideas and small practical experiments,¡± Cul¨¦n notes. Two workshops have been conducted at major international conferences.

Outside academia, the team is collaborating with cultural institutions around Oslo to test how democratic design can be embedded in everyday civic life. ¡°Working with design students, we will explore how digital technologies might be introduced alongside existing infrastructure and institutions such as Museums in Akershus, and community initiatives like P?driv, to build more active forms of local participation,¡± Cul¨¦n explains.

More research in the pipeline

Design4Dem started up in 2024 and is now entering a highly productive phase.

¡°We will conduct the final phase of our qualitative research with coders and designers in Norway and Singapore¨Cto better unpack cross-country dynamics and pressures in the design lifecycle, as concerns social impact, and operating in a prodemocracy manner in a nondemocracy,¡± Cul¨¦n explains.

The team further expects to publish multiple articles from these studies, complemented by interview-based qualitative research to enrich the survey findings. An in-progress scoping review is, Cul¨¦n says, connecting political theory with design research and identifying concrete design possibilities that are more democratic. The group is also helping put together a special issue of Interaction Design and Architecture(s) dedicated to the topic.

Interdisciplinarity in practice

With six members from different academic backgrounds, Cul¨¦n emphasises that Design4Dem is grounded in genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration.

¡°We come from very different research backgrounds, from social and political sciences to design and human¨Ccomputer interaction,¡± she says. This combination has enabled insights that would not have been possible within a single discipline.

She explains that within the group, all members typically have a hand in the group¡¯s various research projects, workshops and other activities, although smaller collaborations also occur.

¡°This kind of interdisciplinary work takes time,¡± Cul¨¦n adds. ¡°We have spent a great deal of effort learning to understand and respect each other¡¯s perspectives and disciplinary lenses. Strong relationships and mutual respect are essential for working through the phase of uncertainty about how to work constructively together.¡±

A design ethos for democracy

Cul¨¦n is keen to underline that the most important thing about Design4Dem isn¡¯t a single study or prototype, but a mindset. ¡°We believe democracy isn¡¯t just something you vote for,¡± she argues. ¡°It is something you can cultivate design for, maintain and live with¨Cand for. If technology is to support democracy, it must be shaped by the same values.¡±

¡°It¡¯s a challenging goal,¡± she adds. ¡°But it¡¯s a goal worth pursuing.¡±