People often spend time in nature to escape an over-technologised life, yet they increasingly rely on technology to do so. Understanding how technology use shapes nature experiences is crucial, given their implications for wellbeing and environmental concern. Through in-depth interviews with 30 people, we examine this technology–nature paradox, focusing on commonplace digital tools used around visits to nature. Our findings chart how people assemble and manage a carefully chosen array of tools for each outing. We show how these technology choices depend on people’s adopted mode(s) of nature engagement, identifying six modes and their associated technologies: adventure, aesthetic, ambient, enquiry, escape, and novelty. We further demonstrate how these modes shape the temporal deployment of tools across phases of a visit: before, during, and after. We offer an interpretation of how people seek to manage the technology–nature paradox and consider broader implications for designing technologies for beneficial nature experiences.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems