We share a speculative fabulation that imagines alternative relations to an increasingly polluted landscape, drawing from environmental illness narratives. The fabulation is brought to life through Ray-Flats, shoes that glow in proximity to toxic sites listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s publicly available database, and an accompanying navigational guide. The storied designs seek to make the extent of chemical pollution in our everyday landscapes perceptible while foregrounding environmental illness experiences as a resource for living in and navigating a toxic world. Bringing together crip and posthuman perspectives, we contribute: 1) an example of designing to stay with environmental precarity, 2) the concept of “felt space" for making diffuse and ongoing environmental problems affectively perceptible through embodied interaction design, and 3) critical reflections on using fabulations with material speculations to foreground marginal perspectives in design.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems