| APrIGF 2023 Session Proposal Submission Form | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Part 1 - Lead Organizer | |||||||||||||||||||
| Contact Person | |||||||||||||||||||
| Ms. Titiksha Vashist | |||||||||||||||||||
| Organization / Affiliation (Please state "Individual" if appropriate) * | |||||||||||||||||||
| The Pranava Institute | |||||||||||||||||||
| Designation | |||||||||||||||||||
| Co-Founder, Lead Researcher | |||||||||||||||||||
| Gender | |||||||||||||||||||
| Female | |||||||||||||||||||
| Economy of Residence | |||||||||||||||||||
| India | |||||||||||||||||||
| Primary Stakeholder Group | |||||||||||||||||||
| Civil Society | |||||||||||||||||||
| List Your Organizing Partners (if any) | |||||||||||||||||||
| Shyam Krishnakumar, The Pranava Institute. shyam@pranavainstitute.com | |||||||||||||||||||
| Part 2 - Session Proposal | |||||||||||||||||||
| Session Title | |||||||||||||||||||
| Mines, Maps and Minerals: Trace the complex material flows of your smartphone to make more sustainable choices | |||||||||||||||||||
| Session Format | |||||||||||||||||||
| Workshop | |||||||||||||||||||
| Where do you plan to organize your session? | |||||||||||||||||||
| Onsite at the venue (with online moderator for questions and comments from remote participants) | |||||||||||||||||||
| Specific Issues for Discussion | |||||||||||||||||||
| Your smartphone's components journey thousands of miles worldwide before reaching you. This includes open pit-mining in Congo, the use of 76 elements including gold and likely, city-scale smartphone factories in China. Join us to uncover the complex material flows of your smartphone and explore how we can make more sustainable choices as consumers. Smartphones may look like devices from the future, but a look at the complex material flows tells us how little we are told about their making and how deeply it is connected to our planet's future. The smartphone is created through a complex web of problematic supply chains, materials, and human labour. Are they at least designed to live long and prosper? Turns out not- manufacturers often plan obsolescence during manufacture in order to boost sales. This reduces the device's life, makes repairability and recycling difficult and increases the carbon footprint. This workshop uses an exploratory toolkit approach to unpack these complex material flows and what we can do about them. By the end of this session, participants will have the power to make better technology decisions and contribute to building the sustainable digital future we all dream of. The workshop will help unpack the following: 1. Where does your smartphone really come from? The complex global journey of the smartphone 2. Tracking your smartphone journey: Track your smartphone's journey on the world map, and uncover out the global distribution of mining, manufacturing and use. Where are you on this map? 3. Calculate your phone-economics- the cost is also your time, attention, accessories, energy and mineral-use. 4. Designed to die: What happens when you dispose a phone? Why are smartphones so hard to repair? Are phones manufactured to have shorter lives? 5. Planetary futures: How can we make better decisions around the smartphone which work not just for us, but also for the planet? How can we become better, conscientious tech consumers? |
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| Describe the Relevance of Your Session to APrIGF | |||||||||||||||||||
| Today, 45% of the world’s internet users are below the age of 25. Young people are increasingly living their lives in the digital domain, as education, entertainment, social life and commerce become online activities, a trend exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While invented only thirty years ago, the smartphone today impacts all aspects of our life. However, school curriculums today do not address how smartphones contribute to global e-waste majorly, and consist of elements which may have harmful impacts on communities and ecologies they are mined in. Moreover, elements in the smartphone have a low recycling rate, making sustainable sourcing and recycling a challenge. This added to the problem of planned and perceived obsolescence makes phone replacement rates a wasteful exercise which is not just costly for consumers, but also deeply damaging to the planet. The toolkit used for the workshop will help participants deconstruct the single unified notion of a smartphone and understand- where the smartphone comes from, who all are involved in the making of it, what is it made up of, and finally, where does it go once it is disposed. We seek to use a multimedia toolkit to unpack and map the material flows of the smartphone. It seeks to expose youth to the material perspective on the smartphone using the meta-frame of BUY-USE-DISPOSE the three ways in which we commonly interact with devices. The final goal is to increase awareness and encourage more conscious behaviour in consumption of technology by understanding the limits of an anthropocentric framework, and understanding planetary futures. We seek to engage researchers, educators, policymakers, parents and civil society in helping us reach out to young people in engaging ways to understand technology and sustainability in a personal way. (Link to the toolkit which will be used to guide the workshop: https://www.unboxingtech.pranavainstitute.com/downloads) |
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| Methodology / Agenda (Please add rows by clicking "+" on the right) | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Moderators & Speakers Info (Please complete where possible) | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Please explain the rationale for choosing each of the above contributors to the session. | |||||||||||||||||||
| This workshop uses a toolkit developed by all three contributors as part a project titled Unboxing Tech Toolkit Series which aims to create open educational resources for youth to help them understand and better navigate their relationship with technology. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, we see a sharp rise in the dependence of digital technologies for education for students and teachers- often becoming a primary mode of learning. This has increased exposure to devices, as well as made devices essential to access education. Technology usage has become more pervasive across all age groups, with little control (parental or otherwise) and the normalisation of personal devices for students regardless of age. This also makes children early consumers of technology as an essential service, and makes youth the largest group online. Given this context, we believe in creating research, multimedia resources, and workshop-based pedagogies which can help digital education become more holistic, as well as accessible. The contributors bring together expertise in emerging technology, policy, human-centred design, research and education which put together has created toolkits which are co-created with youth across India, and are being used by youth across the world. These toolkits have been conducted across cities in India, as well as presented at global conferences on education, design and technology. Link to project: https://www.unboxingtech.pranavainstitute.com/ https://tacticaltech.org/news/unboxing-tech Shyam Krishnakumar is the Co-Founder at The Pranava Institute, which works at the intersection of technology, public policy and society to shape sustainable digital futures. Prior to this, he has worked with think tanks in Delhi and was co-founder, EduSeva Technologies, a social venture to democratise access to world class education. Shyam has a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Amrita University and a Masters in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Titiksha Vashist is Co-founder and Lead Researcher at The Pranava Institute. Her work focuses on socio-political implications of technology in India. Her research ranges from Public Digital Infrastructures to Technology, Ethics, and Design. She holds a Masters in Politics and International Affairs from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is an alum of the Elizabeth J. Sommers Women’s Leadership Programme at the George Washington University. She is also an educator who seeks to create resources for youth to better navigate a digital world. Dhanyashri is a product designer, passionate on unpacking behavioural and cultural influences in design through research. She holds a Masters in Human- Centred Design and is also an Orthodontist with various scientific research publications to her credit. Coming from an unconventional background, she believes in cross-functional approach towards research, ideation and designing experiences. |
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| If you need assistance to find a suitable speaker to contribute to your session, or an onsite facilitator for your online-only session, please specify your request with details of what you are looking for. | |||||||||||||||||||
| No assistance is required but additional speakers and facilitators with expertise in e-waste, or education and sustainability are welcome. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Please declare if you have any potential conflict of interest with the Program Committee 2023. | |||||||||||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||||||||||
| Are you or other session contributors planning to apply for the APrIGF Fellowship Program 2023? | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Number of Attendees (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||||||||
| Gender Balance in Moderators/Speakers (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||||||||
| Consent | |||||||||||||||||||
 I agree that my data can be submitted to forms.for.asia and processed by APrIGF organizers for the program selection of APrIGF 2023. |
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