Guest Editors

• Alma Leora Culén, University of Oslo, Norway
• Jasmin Niess, University of Oslo, Norway
• Nicholas Stevens, University of Oslo, Norway
• Jason Miklian, University of Oslo, Norway

Important dates

• Submission deadline: May 15th, 2026
• Notification to the authors: July 15th, 2026
• Camera ready paper: August 31st, 2026
• Publication of the special issue: Autumn 2026 (tentative)

Overview

Democracy today is not only debated in parliaments and assemblies, but also continuously
shaped — and sometimes aggravated — by the technologies that mediate our everyday lives. Social media feeds amplify outrage, recommendation engines entrench polarisation, and algorithmic infrastructures concentrate power in the hands of a few global actors. What once seemed like a promise of digital democracy now too often appears as a machinery of division and manipulation.
Yet, design opens other possibilities. Across various research fields, communities and
researchers are experimenting with alternative technologies, including cooperative social media platforms, deliberation tools for citizens’ assemblies, AI systems that support participation, and infrastructures for commoning. These are not only technical artefacts but also democratic experiments, reminding us that technologies can embody values such as inclusion, accountability, transparency, and collective agency.
This special issue explores democratic technology design, the idea that technologies can be designed not merely for efficiency or engagement, but for democracy itself. What would it mean to treat algorithms as accountable civic actors? To imagine infrastructures as shared commons? To design platforms that cultivate empathy, dialogue, and care rather than outrage?
We invite contributions that make such imagination possible: conceptual frameworks linking political theory with design methods; participatory and relational practices for developing democratic technologies; empirical exemplars of counter-models to platform capitalism; and critical reflections on how design might resist manipulation, polarisation, and exclusion.Designing for democracy is not only a technical challenge but also a cultural, social, and political one. It requires crossing disciplinary boundaries—bringing together HCI, participatory design, CSCW, design research, STS, philosophy, and political theory. By consolidating these perspectives, this special issue aims to chart a growing but still fragmented field, opening a space for rethinking how technologies can support democratic futures.

Topics of Interest

We invite a broad range of researchers to address both theoretical and practical issues around democratic technology design, including conceptual papers, methodological innovations, empirical case studies, design exemplars, and critical reflections.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Principles and frameworks, e.g. using theories of democracy as design principles
• Practices and methods, e.g. participatory and relational design for democracy, tools
for deliberation and collective decision-making, speculative and adversarial design
practices
• Systems and alternatives, e.g. alternative or counter-models to platform capitalism,
cooperative social media and civic platforms, AI systems designed for participation
and accountability, digital infrastructures for commoning
• Critical and situated perspectives, e.g. responses to crises such as polarisation, false
information, and exclusion, inclusivity, feminist, postcolonial, and indigenous
perspectives, democratic technology and long-term social justice design
• Design artefacts and prototypes, e.g. design contributions, prototypes, and exemplars
of democratic technology, transition and infrastructuring approaches to sustainable
democratic futures.

Submission procedure 

All submissions must be original and not under review elsewhere.
Manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .pdf format.
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Prospective participants are invited to submit an 8-20 pages paper (including authors’ information, abstract, tables, figures, and references).
Papers should be written according to the IxD&A authors’ guidelines .
Submission page -> link
(when submitting the paper please choose the section: ‘SI: Democratic Technology Design‘)

For scientific advice and for any query please contact the guest editors:
• almira [at] uio [dot] no
• jasminni [at] uio [dot] no
• nichoss [at] uio [dot] no
• jason.miklian [at] globe [dot] uio [dot] no
marking the subject as: IxD&A special issue on ‘Democratic Technology Design’‘.