This paper presents intermediate-level knowledge in the form of a taxonomy that highlights 12 different ways in which interactive tech might support forest-related experiences that are joyful for humans. It can inspire and provide direction for designs that aim to enrich the experiential texture of forests. The taxonomy stemmed from a reflexive analysis of 104 speculative ideas produced during a year-long co-design process, where we co-experienced and creatively engaged a diverse range forests and forest-related activities with 250+ forest-goers with varied backgrounds and sensitivities. Given that breadth of forests and populations involved, our work foregrounds a rich set of design directions that set an actionable early frame for creating tech that supports joyful human-forest interplays – one that we hope will be extended and consolidated in future research, ours and others'.
Wood has become increasingly applied in shape-changing interfaces for its eco-friendly and smart responsive properties, while its applications face challenges as it remains primarily driven by humidity. We propose TH-Wood, a biodegradable actuator system composed of wood veneer and microbial polymers, driven by both temperature and humidity, and capable of functioning in complex outdoor environments. This dual-factor-driven approach enhances the sensing and response channels, allowing for more sophisticated coordinating control methods. To assist in designing and utilizing the system more effectively, we developed a structure library inspired by dynamic plant forms, conducted extensive technical evaluations, created an educational platform accessible to users, and provided a design tool for deformation adjustments and behavior previews. Finally, several ecological applications demonstrate the potential of TH-Wood to significantly enhance human interaction with natural environments and expand the boundaries of human-nature relationships.
Zoos aim to uphold high animal welfare standards while educating the public, yet the direct interactions that attract visitors can negatively impact the animals. Exploring technological solutions to reshape this human-animal relationship in zoos, we developed a novel device allowing lemurs to trigger olfactory, auditory, and visual stimuli in their enclosure. Over 63 days, lemurs engaged most with multimodal stimuli and with visual the least. We then created a similar device for zoo visitors to educate them about lemurs and their stimuli choices. Deploying for 20 days (no devices, lemur-only, visitor-only, and both devices), we examined the impact on visitor behaviour, education, empathy, and experience. From 968 questionnaires and 25,782 visitors, we found that using technology on the lemur and visitor sides jointly significantly enhanced all measured visitor factors, even if the visitors did not directly interact with the device or observe lemurs using theirs. This approach supports long-term conservation and visitor education efforts.
Design tools and probing, in particular, have long offered critical perspectives in HCI, broadening the understanding of who benefits from the design. Further, the designerly implementation of critical perspectives and theories using tools such as probes can support HCI designers with theoretically informed dialogical tools. However, these approaches and processes are majorly designed to understand human interactions. In this paper, we introduce urban noticing probes developed to decentre the humans in multispecies interactions by following the arts of noticing theory: noticing into, for, and through within urban relationality, focusing on the case of community animals in Türkiye. Our goal is to create a better understanding of the functions of "urban noticing probes" for HCI designers and researchers to (1) gain relational and reflexive awareness, (2) identify intervention spaces for multispecies cohabitation, and (3) explore future design directions for urban noticing probes.
We introduce Being The Creek, a mobile augmented reality (MAR) experience that invites participants to take a “first-person” perspective of a historically-significant-creek by lying alongside her and getting attuned to her environment through embodied multisensory engagement. Individuals experience how the world might appear from the Creek’s perspective, from the pre-colonial respect she received from Indigenous peoples, through the industrial period when the Creek was used as a sewer, to a speculative future of collaborative survival despite capitalism. Fifteen participants of our study each experienced a range of emotions while “being” the Creek through temporal and spatial explorations. As participants moved between human-centered and creek-centered perspectives, they explored the Creek’s unique subjectivity and the human-nonhuman power relations, leading them to de-emphasize the stereotypical human-centric stance. We discuss designing mobile experiences that encourage movement beyond human-centric perspectives and encourage “noticing” for more-than-human worlds.
Efforts to integrate living organisms in the design of new technologies are often motivated by prospects of greater sustainability and increased connection with more-than-human worlds. In this paper, we critically discuss these motivations by analysing the vast and mostly hidden ecologies of more-than-human organisms implicated in a biodesign lab experiment. Through the lenses of labour theory, we investigate the extent to which organisms’ bodily functions and relationships can be subsumed into capitalist modes of production. In order to help reveal and map out the network of more-than-human contributors to biodesign, we develop a workshop method and a labour provenance analytical framework that identifies five types of more-than-human labourers, stretching from the centre to the periphery of biodesign. We conclude by discussing how sustainable approaches should account for wider more-than-human ecologies, and how the labour lens could help stress conflicting goals, implicit anthropocentric agendas and ways of improving organismal welfare in biological design and HCI.
Design aesthetics, predominantly concerned with artefact’s form and experience, has significantly shaped the evolution of design and HCI. As design practices expand to incorporate living organisms and embrace posthumanist shifts, traditional human-centered aesthetics increasingly fall short in addressing nonhuman experiences and the ethical and ecological complexities of more-than-human entanglements. Responding to the absence of overarching guidance for moving beyond traditional aesthetics, this paper systematically reviews more-than-human aesthetic perspectives within and beyond HCI and design. We first examine contemporary critical aesthetic discourse across disciplines such as art, geography, and human-animal interaction, identifying three key orientations that move away from human-centric aesthetics---phenomenologically, ontologically, and conceptually. We then review artefact-oriented publications in HCI and design venues to offer concrete examples of how these perspectives can be navigated, interpreted, combined, and applied in practice. This paper contributes a critical framework to inspire and challenge designers as they engage with aesthetics in more-than-human design.