Global Reflections: expanding the VSD Envisioning Cards through decolonial justice perspectives

How might Value Sensitive Design change when questions of power, colonial histories, epistemic plurality and relational responsibility become part of the design conversation? A new Global Reflections Extension to the VSD Envisioning Cards, developed through the Delft Design for Values Seed Project Design for Values and Critical Raw Materials: Decolonial Justice Perspectives, creates a practical tool for exploring these questions.

Over the past two years, the Delft Design for Values Seed Project Design for Values and Critical Raw Materials: Decolonial Justice Perspectives, has explored how decolonial perspectives can enrich Design for Values research and practice. Taking critical raw materials and climate and energy transitions as important starting points, the project has examined how technological development is shaped by global inequalities, colonial histories, different knowledge traditions, and competing understandings of relationships between humans, technologies and the environment.

One of the outcomes of this work is the Global Reflections Envisioning Cards Extension Set, conceived and led by Anna Melnyk and co-developed with Ángela Díaz, with an artistic collaboration with the Ecuadorian photographic collective SolipsisArt.

The extension builds upon the original Value Sensitive Design Envisioning Cards by introducing Global Reflections as an additional criterion for reflection. The original toolkit invites users to consider Stakeholders, Values, Time, Pervasiveness and Multi-lifespan. Global Reflections adds another question to this process: how might the assumptions, power relations and ways of knowing through which we understand technological development themselves need to be questioned?

From a conceptual gap to ten Global Reflections

The extension emerged through an iterative process of research, workshops, and dialogue on climate transitions, critical raw materials, and decolonial justice. Across these engagements, several questions repeatedly surfaced that were not fully captured by the existing envisioning criteria:

Who defines the problem? Whose knowledge counts? How do colonial histories and unequal power relations continue to shape technological development? What assumptions about progress, nature and responsibility are built into the futures we design?

These questions became the basis for ten Global Reflections:

Power and Privilege · Epistemic Diversity · Positionality · Universalism · Colonial Legacies · Nature–Human Dichotomy · Relational Responsibility · Common Futures · Complicity and Benefit · Discomfort and Transformation.

Together, the concepts invite users to reflect on assumptions, relationships and structures shaping decisions about the design, assessment and governance of technologies and socio-technical systems.

The cards deliberately do not provide a checklist for what a “decolonial” or “just” design should look like. Instead, they create space for questions that may otherwise remain outside conventional design and engineering processes. The Universalism card, for example, asks what assumptions of universality underpin a decision-making process and whose realities they erase. Relational Responsibility asks who we remain in relationship with through our decisions and to whom responsibility is owed. Common Futures questions assumptions about progress, development and innovation. Discomfort and Transformation asks what becomes possible when discomfort is treated as part of transformation rather than something to be engineered away.

Co-creating through concepts and art

An important part of the project was that the extension should not only talk about epistemic diversity and plurality, but also experiment with these principles in the way the tool itself was created.

Following the initial conceptual development and participatory workshops, the project developed into a collaboration between Melnyk, Díaz and SolipsisArt Photographic Collective in Ecuador. Rather than asking artists to illustrate concepts that had already been completely defined, participating photographers were invited to interpret them.

Ten photographers each engaged with one Global Reflection, developing original photographic interpretations and accompanying artistic reflections. The images were subsequently developed through a collaborative curatorial process. The photographs, therefore, function not simply as illustrations but as another form of engagement with the concepts.

This process resulted in ten distinctive visual encounters with the Global Reflections, including Yinna Higuera’s interpretation of Power and Privilege, Alejandra Rea’s Epistemic Diversity, Anay Pillajo’s Positionality, Ivonne Flores’s Universalism, Carol Cortéz’s Colonial Legacies, Cristina Chamba’s Nature–Human Dichotomy, Verónica Alvear’s Relational Responsibility, Claudia Ramón’s Common Futures, Ximena Troya’s Complicity and Benefit, and Karla Martínez’s Discomfort and Transformation.

A tool for reflection rather than predetermined answers

The Global Reflections Extension can be used together with the original Envisioning Cards or independently as a facilitation instrument. Each card combines an artistic photograph, a concept, a short framing text and reflection prompts. The accompanying artistic reflections offer an alternative point of entry: facilitators can begin with the photograph and invite participants to interpret what they encounter before introducing the conceptual framing.

This makes the extension suitable for different contexts, including education, research and design projects, workshops, policy dialogues and community settings. Rather than prescribing what participants should conclude, the cards are intended to create a structured space for critical inquiry, self-positioning and conversation.

This openness is important to the broader ambition of the Seed Project. Design for Values asks us to consider values throughout technological development. Global Reflections pushes this reflection one step further by asking us to examine the standpoint from which values, problems and desirable futures are being defined in the first place.

From critical raw materials to broader questions of technological futures

The development of Global Reflections began within the context of critical raw materials, where questions about sustainability are inseparable from extraction, territory, global inequalities and histories of colonialism. Yet the resulting questions extend well beyond critical raw materials.

Who benefits from a technological decision? Whose knowledge becomes authoritative? Which assumptions are treated as universal? How are relationships with nature conceptualised? Which futures are imagined as desirable and which futures become difficult even to articulate?

These questions are relevant wherever technologies participate in shaping societies and environments.

The Global Reflections Extension, therefore, represents both an outcome of the Seed Project and an invitation to continue its central inquiry: what might Design for Values become when global justice, epistemic plurality and relational responsibility are not peripheral considerations, but part of how we imagine technological futures from the beginning?

The Global Reflections Envisioning Cards Extension was developed through the Delft Design for Values Seed Project Design for Values and Critical Raw Materials: Decolonial Justice Perspectives, funded by the Delft Design for Values Institute and supported by the TU Delft Decolonial Working Group. It was developed under license from the University of Washington Value Sensitive Design Lab as an independently developed extension complementing the original Envisioning Cards.

For any questions, please contact Anna Melnyk at a.melnyk@tudelft.nl.

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