A master programme thesis from Aalborg University
The Value Sensitive Design of a Data Management System for Cooperative Waste Management in Brazil: How to reconcile the values of Historically Marginalised stakeholders with management concerns
Author
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2025
Submitted on
2025-10-02
Pages
61 pages
Abstract
Waste pickers (catadores in Brazilian Portuguese) in Brazil play a vital role in urban waste management, but they remain socially and institutionally marginalised. At the Cooperativa de Catadores Recicla Mais Brasil, waste pickers have largely been excluded from former initiatives aimed at designing digital solutions to support and enhance their daily work practices. Namely, their roles, needs, and values have received little to no consideration in design processes, while perceived deficits in transparency, together with ongoing power imbalances, have resulted in mistrust and hinder the development of inclusive and accountable digital solutions. This thesis aims to adopt an ethical approach for designing a Data Management System (DMS) within the Erasmus+ Egalitarian project, ensuring the inclusion of waste pickers’ values while addressing the operational needs of the cooperative management. The research adopts a techno-anthropological perspective and employs Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as its main framework, and particularly, a participatory VSD to involve a wide range of stakeholders, including historically marginalised waste pickers in the design process. Here, participatory methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and workshops were conducted in Brasília (Brazil) and Copenhagen (Denmark) to uncover stakeholder values and manage the value tensions that arose during the design process. This strategy delivers the value hierarchies that can be embodied technologically to identify design requirements and technical solutions for the Data Management System (also referred to as EcoSistema), integrating ethical design principles. As a result, the stakeholders’ values and norms have been balanced and prioritised to integrating them into concrete digital solutions for an ethically grounded DMS suitable for fairer waste management in Brazil. Indeed, functional features are not only supported by ethical principles, but also due to more inclusive and participatory design practices, digital products generated can be agents-/context-sensitive and enact more sustainable digital practices in the Brasília’s waste management sector.
Keywords
Documents
Colophon: This page is part of the AAU Student Projects portal, which is run by Aalborg University. Here, you can find and download publicly available bachelor's theses and master's projects from across the university dating from 2008 onwards. Student projects from before 2008 are available in printed form at Aalborg University Library.
If you have any questions about AAU Student Projects or the research registration, dissemination and analysis at Aalborg University, please feel free to contact the VBN team. You can also find more information in the AAU Student Projects FAQs.