Human body digital twins; electroceutical brain implants; medical extended reality interfaces. Emerging digital products, services and infrastructure have the potential to positively disrupt healthcare for the benefit of patients and wider health systems. Yet, increasing adoption of digital technologies is also creating critical health issues for the planet like resource depletion, carbon emissions and waste. Whilst mainstream technological visions of the future can be compelling, such corporate imaginaries often also help to perpetuate the unsustainable, unjust, and unchecked design-innovation practices that dominate today. Technologies are not neutral, they actively embody the financially driven, effective accelerationism of their developers. Further, the recent rapid advancement of AI means digital technologies are quickly becoming ‘moral agents’ which can autonomously make decisions that impact the natural environment without our consent.

In response, this presentation will argue that next generation digital healthcare products, services and infrastructures must be inherently More-than-Human, that is, sustainable and equitable for the planet’s human stakeholders and non-human stakeholders – the ecological (e.g., flora, fauna, water, climate), and the technological (e.g., materials, componentry, devices, data, AI) – alike. It will explore how we can begin to transition towards sustainable digital healthcare futures through a combination of Design-led research methods – More-than-Human Design, Sustainable Design and Participatory Design. This combined approach can help researcher-practitioners to creatively envision prototypes and interactions which better identify the planetary impacts of new health technologies earlier in the design-innovation process. Such foregrounding sits contrary to normative practice which typically seeks to mitigate the unsustainability of a technology only after its widespread implementation.

The presentation will stress how acknowledging the deeply entangled interrelations and dependencies between the human, the ecological, and the technological, is a key step in engendering a healthy planet that will in turn support near and further future sustainable digital innovation for healthcare.

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