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

While persuasion has often been considered as 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 are originated from and 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 persuasions. 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 deeper understanding of religious values can help design for sustainable living, and broaden the scope of CSCW literature in the various domains.