The project Imagining Sustainable Digital Futures: Outlines for Eco-Digital Citizenship (Research Council of Finland 2022-2025) studies the social and ecological unsustainability of our digitalised society. Digitalisation and technology have often been put forward as solutions to address climate change, environmental pollution, and biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are only partial and perhaps delusive solutions to the planetary crises if their sustainability is not addressed.

In the project, the concept of eco-digital agency is developed to meet the need for creative and radical imagination that challenges and resists the taken-for-grantedness of the injustices and unsustainabilities in the digitalised society. At their best, images of alternatives can spark action toward futures that are sustainable and fair. Although the ability to imagine alternatives is crucial in fostering hope for more just futures, breaking away from the present and the familiar is not easy. In fact, it has been argued that the lack of imagination has prevented finding effective solutions to the urgent planetary crises, and our time is characterised by the decline of political and utopian imagination pressingly needed to challenge capitalism. By tackling these issues, the project contributes to nascent research that explores and experiments with so-called speculative methods in the field of critical media and infrastructure studies.

In the project, alternative futures are imagined together with young people. Their perceptions, hopes, and fears about the future matter because the future concerns them particularly. Yet, their voices often remain unheard in politics, and strategy or urban planning despite the growing recognition of their anxiety associated with climate change and environmental problems. The core of the project are experiments in which art-based methods are used to imagine sustainable digital futures. These include, for example, workshops with generative AI, creative writing, and design fiction. The project has been organising Alternative Futures movie series at Turku Book Café in the winter-spring 2024 together with Turku Book Café and Cultural Interaction Researcher Network (Kultva). As part of the project, a repair café has been initiated in Turku in the winter 2024.