ROOT @UIUC

The Reworlding Our Orientations to Technology Lab

Technology is often imagined as a tool for making the world faster, more efficient, and more productive. At ROOT Lab, we ask a different question: What kinds of worlds do our technologies make possible, and what kinds of worlds should they help us create?

ROOT Lab examines how computing can cultivate more just, caring, and ecologically grounded futures. We study and design technologies that strengthen relationships between people, communities, and the environments they inhabit. Instead of treating innovation as an end in itself, we investigate how technologies shape—and are shaped by—the social, political, cultural, and ecological worlds around us.

For us, reworlding our orientations to technology means changing more than the technologies we build. It means transforming the assumptions, values, and relationships that guide technological design and use. We move beyond dominant narratives of extraction, optimization, scaling, and endless growth toward orientations rooted in care, reciprocity, justice, plurality, collective flourishing, and many other values that are not reducible to material accumulation.

Our research spans HCI, responsible AI, ICTD, critical data studies, the future of work, and community-centered design. We collaborate with communities, public institutions, and interdisciplinary partners to envision and build technologies that address real-world challenges while expanding possibilities for more equitable and livable futures.

Like the roots of a forest, much of what sustains technological worlds lies beneath the surface. ROOT Lab is dedicated to understanding these hidden relationships and to cultivating new ones that help both people and the planet thrive.