Digital Inequalities in the Nordics and Beyond: Can we build a smart city designed to tackle issues of digital inclusion?

Wednesday 9 April 2025, 12pm – 1.30pm starting with light lunch
QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Building Z9, Room 607 (how to get there >)
Hybrid event: in person and zoom

This guest seminar is hosted by the QUT Design Lab. Dr Johanna Ylipulli's visiting fellowship at QUT is being supported with funding awarded by the Academy of Finland.

ABSTRACT

Digital inequality is pervasive, touching all demographic groups and all areas of life, and its mechanisms and manifestations are highly complex, especially in societies that are saturated with new technologies. The talk introduces DISC, Digital Inequalities in Smart Cities, a design anthropological project funded by the Research Council of Finland and spanning over five years, from 2020 to 2025. We have executed it in collaboration with significant academic and non-academic partners, including Finland's two largest cities, Helsinki and Espoo. In addition to research carried out in the capital region of Finland, the focus has been on Barcelona, Spain. We have studied through qualitative methods, firstly, how cities’ decision-makers understand and manage digital inequality; secondly, how city inhabitants experience digital inequality in so-called smart cities; and thirdly, how issues of digital inequality could be tackled in practice. The talk presents some central findings, with a special emphasis on novel concepts the project has explored, such as eco-digital agency and radical digital agency. In addition, it introduces practical solutions for increasing digital inclusion, such as collaborating with public library networks and building community hubs for digital democracy.

SPEAKER

Dr Johanna Ylipulli, a Docent in Digital Culture and an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at Aalto University's Department of Computer Science, is currently a visiting fellow in the QUT Design Lab. She is one of the Finnish pioneers in broad interdisciplinary research bridging social sciences and technology. With 15 years of experience in navigating the intersections of anthropology, design, and HCI, her work investigates the transformative capacity of urban digitalization and emerging technologies. Dr Ylipulli is especially interested in participatory and speculative design methodologies that enable communities to conceptualise diverse futures. Her research contests traditional norms and self-evident 'truths' by incorporating critical anthropological viewpoints into design and technology development, redefining how we engage with digital societies and smart cities. Her leadership in initiatives like "Digital Inequality in Smart Cities" advances discourse on democracy, data ethics, and the role of imagination in shaping our urban landscapes.

READINGS

Ylipulli, Johanna, and Vigren, Minna (2023). From Skilled Users to Critical Citizens? Imagining and Future-making as Part of Digital Citizenship. In Danica Radovanović (ed.): Digital Literacy and Inclusion: Stories, Platforms, Communities. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30808-6_2

Ylipulli, Johanna; Pouke, Matti; Ehrenberg, Nils, and Keinonen, Turkka (2023). Public Libraries as a Partner in Digital innovation Project: Designing a Virtual Reality Experience to Support Digital Literacy. Future Generation Computer Systems, 149, 594-605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2023.08.001

Ylipulli, Johanna, and Hämäläinen, João. (2023). Towards Practice-oriented Framework for Digital Inequality in Smart Cities. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T '23). ACM, 180-190. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593743.3593781

Ylipulli, Johanna, and Luusua, Aale (2019). "Without Libraries What Have We?" Public Libraries as Nodes for Technological Empowerment in the Era of Smart Cities, AI and Big Data. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, Vienna, Austria, 3-7 June 2019. ACM, 92-101. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328320.3328387