Call for DDfV Researchers: Value Design Challenges at the Time of COVID-19

To understand the challenges of the pandemic from a value design point of view, we would like to invite DDfV researchers to write a research statement to explain how their current work intersects with these challenges. This could comprise keywords, bullet points, or a short paragraph (examples below). Please send (with a picture) to m.j.dennis@tudelft.nl to have this hosted on the DDfV website.

Many thanks – and hope you stay safe and well during this time!

DDfV institute

A sample research statement is below:

Covid-19 & Digital Well-Being

My research investigates how we can improve our ability to live well with emerging technologies, focusing on future designs of online architecture. Over the last decade, our reliance on online products and services has steadily increased, but since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic this has escalated to an unprecedented level. Many of us have been required to move our entire lives online in a matter of days or weeks, now using the Internet to work, shop, socialise, and obtain basic medical information. While being able to do this is fortunate in many ways, living a life that is almost entirely mediated by online technologies comes with its own problems. Many of these problems will be immediately felt by those who are now spending large parts of their life online, but some may only become obvious in the months and years after the pandemic has passed. In the short term, extended screentime has already been shown to cause physical, mental, and emotional discomfort; in the long term these problems may well be more nuanced. Long-term problems are likely to include the disappearance of ways of life that we later come to realise were an essential part of who and what we are, especially practices relating to our sociality. Examples include social conventions involving tactility, the reasonable expectation of face-to-face contact, and shared embodied experiences (conversing, eating, drinking together). I also worry about how these problems might scale up on a collective level. What might our societies look like if – for reasons of safety or expediency – we have been forced to create a world in which we are required to spend much of our waking hours online? What will be the effects of this on our digital well-being (both personally and collectively)? Answering these questions will be difficult, but I hope not impossible. In terms of my current research, I’m in the process of writing two articles dealing with ethical issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first piece, “Pandemics and the Loss of Our Passionate Attachments”, was originally going to be on love as a moral emotion. Now it will examine how many of our passionate attachments are socially orientated, as well as the difficulties replicating this type of loving sociality online. The second is a co-authored piece examining how our collective response to the pandemic can be affected by the online (mis) behaviour of celebrities.

More from Matthew see https://www.matthewjamesdennis.com/