Design and digital autonomies

Design & Digital Autonomies (D&DA) is an open research platform that investigates the collective and individual capacity to control digital tools, processes, and infrastructures in an era of accelerating intelligent automation and delegated agency. Drawing on medical ethics — specifically the evolving concepts of patient autonomy and informed consent — the platform extends the notion of autonomy from individual users to citizens and communities in non-medicalized contexts, encompassing DIY and hacking practices, critical media literacy, local AI infrastructures, and community-generated strategies for self-determination. Through a series of workshops, talks, and lectures, D&DA builds a collective, open-ended definition of what digital autonomy means in practice, while a practice-based research strand generates guidelines and patterns grounding these concepts into applicable knowledge for designers, technologists, educators, innovators, and policy makers. The platform publishes selected resources on autonomy across technology, design, and art, asking how design can actively foster a paradigm in which multiple, situated digital autonomies become capacities of people and organizations rather than features of a technological architecture.