Payal Arora

"Indigenous Approaches to Green Design"

This talk makes the case for Indigenous approaches to design as a key pathway to a sustainable future. Indigenous cultures in the Global South have long valued frugality, repair, collective action, and subsistence, many of which are appropriated by popular Western models of sustainability today. We need to reposition the models of degrowth, the circular economy, and the doughnut economy in a larger paradigm of user choice and social conditions. This requires a shift in worldview from data as “the new oil” to a global commons resource and reframe global resiliency, regeneration, and redistribution by realigning Global South realities with northern frictions of past practice.

Bio

Prof. Payal Arora is Chair of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative. She is a digital anthropologist and comes with two decades of user-experiences in marginalized contexts to shape inclusive designs, and data governance policies. She is the author of award-winning books including ‘The Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press. Forbes called her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ About 150 international media outlets have covered her work including The BBC, Financial Times, and The Economist. Her latest book is with MIT Press, titled, ‘From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech.”