Religion and Sustainability: Lessons of Sustainable Computing from Islamic Religious Communities

While persuasion has often been considered an important design tool for achieving sustainable behavior, a growing scholarship is criticizing it for its narrow focus on individuals and an overarching economic worldview. This criticism is often based on the limitations of economic-rationales that many persuasive design efforts hold and cannot fully capture the values of people who reside outside the modern scientific world - especially where values originate from and are shaped by religiosity and spirituality. We join this discourse and argue that such a narrow view of persuasion sidelines the theological roots. Based on our six-month long ethnography with the Islamic communities in a Bangladeshi city, Kushtia, we describe how 'motivation' and 'habit' are built there - two of the basic components of persuasion. Drawing from a rich body of literature on the sociology of religions and theology, we highlight how Islamic values are closely tied to the idea of persuasion and reflect a vision of sustainable living. We further discuss how such a deeper understanding of religious values can help design for sustainable living and broaden the scope of CSCW literature in the various domains.