Designing inclusive and sustainable digital solutions
How can we Design inclusive and sustainable digital solutions?
CDTM – Center for Digital Technology and Management is a joint institution of the most prominent public universities, originally from Munich and now in Valencia, offering a hands-on innovation program that brings value both to students and to the companies partnering on projects during the program.
The CDTM community is broad and highly driven toward innovation and entrepreneurship. For this reason, we sought to create an event open to innovative individuals from this diverse community—whether entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs, students or executives, digital developers or business professionals.
How might ethics and sustainability be introduced at the core of digital development?
A multidisciplinary workshop based on Ethics
We designed, organized, and facilitated a hands-on workshop focused on the social and environmental impact of digital solutions, followed by a space for networking and conversation. For this event, we developed a specific methodological tool to help us incorporate all aspects of environmental and social impact into digital development: we called it “Ethics Commissions.”
What does this method involve? It involves creating groups (‘commissions’) focused on defending specific areas of impact. And becoming experts in their area, in order to defend it, while collaborating with other working groups. For example, one group focused on accessibility issues for users with different visual abilities; another focused on users with less digital literacy. Another group focused on the issue of energy consumption. Thus, each group of people developed their own guidelines to contribute to their area, becoming more expert in their field and defending it during product development.
During the workshop, we first worked on identifying and defining problems worth solving through digitalization. Only after that did we work on ideating and prototyping digital solutions to address the problems we had defined. For this, we used paper prototyping to visualize the interfaces.
Connecting, Educating, and Empowering the Innovators of Tomorrow
This event for Valencia Design Week 2024 was a combination of the experience from both entities, CDTM and Monnou, and was held at the Valencia Innovation Capital headquarters (Harinera building).
Team
Pedro Sáez Martínez
CDTM Valencia Management Team