Keynote Speakers

Digital innovation, social justice and transformative futures

Abstract

Digital innovations, including AI, are increasingly called upon to respond to pressing social and ecological challenges. Yet digital technologies are not external to the issues they seek to address: they are produced within systems shaped by unequal distributions of power, contested values, and competing visions of change. When this is overlooked, well-intentioned interventions can reproduce inequalities, intensify problems, or create new harms.

In this talk, I argue that efforts to design and deploy digital technologies for social good call for greater capacity to engage with complexity rather than reduce it. Too often, social issues are translated into technical problems, obscuring the wider social, economic, and political relations that shape them. Engaging with this complexity requires attending to plural ways of knowing and to the productive tensions that emerge when different visions of social good, and ways of putting them into practice, are brought together.

Drawing on research across diverse contexts, I explore how social justice-oriented approaches grounded in co-production can challenge assumptions, open spaces for collective learning, and support alternative technological directions that can contribute to more just socio-ecological futures.

Sonic Universal Design: From Accessibility to Participation

Abstract

As digital technologies increasingly shape education, healthcare, communication, culture, and public life, ensuring that everyone can participate meaningfully in these experiences has become a central societal challenge. While accessibility efforts have traditionally focused on removing barriers, the broader goal is participation: enabling people to engage, contribute, connect, and thrive.

This keynote introduces Sonic Universal Design, a framework that considers sound as a powerful resource for fostering inclusion and participation across diverse contexts and populations. Rather than viewing sound merely as information or feedback, Sonic Universal Design explores how auditory experiences can support communication, orientation, learning, rehabilitation, social connection, and engagement in both physical and digital environments.

Drawing on research and applications from hearing and balance rehabilitation, immersive technologies, accessible cultural experiences, and multisensory interaction design, the talk illustrates how sound can be leveraged to create technologies that adapt to diverse abilities, preferences, and life situations. The examples demonstrate how designing for human diversity often produces solutions that benefit far wider populations than initially envisioned.