Summary: Exploring methods for investigating the impacts of computing infrastructures on more-than-human stakeholders, exposing the co-creation of futures with non-human partners.
Description: Information technology scholars and design practitioners increasingly use design work to reckon with computing’s contribution to climate change. Some scholars have confronted the limitations (and outright violences) carried forward by design methods that center humans and marginalize other beings and ecologies (see Light et al. 2017). Other scholars expose the ways design methods cast non-human entities as inert matter or resources to exploit rather than beings with their own experiences, contexts, needs, and desires (see Liu et al. 2018). Halting capitalism’s (and in turn, computing’s) accelerating demands on more-than-human worlds may require library and information scholars and practitioners to adopt methods that support relationship, reciprocity, and co-creation of futures with the more-than-human.
This module considers a range of methods made possible with more-than-human partners. Participatory Design (PD) methods represent a set of practices rooted in the Scandinavian workplace democracy movement and predicated on the belief that the very people implicated in, and living out designed futures should be able to participate in their creation. The PD approaches described by Bastian (2019) and Light, Powell and Shklovski (2017) value the unique knowledges that individuals and communities possess about their own experiences, contexts, needs, and desires; these approaches are often used in work that aims to address inequities by centering marginalized human communities in research and design practices. We then ground and rework these methods vis-a-vis Kim Tallbear (2011) and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) perspectives on processes of indigenous knowledge production, partnership, and world-making to explore wider design philosophies and methods developed in solidarity with stakeholders, both human and otherwise.
These selected readings:
- Assert the stakes of moving beyond a human-centered lens
- Introduce More-than-Human Participatory research and provide examples of projects
- Explore collaborative design methods and interventions
- Contextualize MtH-PR collaborations and relationships as adjacent and indebted to a broader web of Indigenous, non-western, and subaltern knowledges and practices of relationality
Readings:
Bastian, Michelle. “Towards a More-Than-Human Participatory Research.” In Participatory Research in More-Than-Human Worlds, pp. 33-51. Routledge, 2016.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Sacred and the Superfund.” In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Light, Ann, Alison Powell, and Irina Shklovski. “Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 270-279. ACM, 2017.
Liu, Jen, Daragh Byrne, and Laura Devendorf. “Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 40. ACM, 2018.
TallBear, Kim. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.” Cultural Anthropology 24 (2011).
Discussion Questions:
- How might we understand and engage with concepts of participation, agency, power, and reciprocity beyond human experiences (and definitions)? Where might these concepts or definitions break down?
- How might you approach co-designing with more-than-human partners/stakeholders/actors? What could collaboration look like for different beings and across different scales and lifetimes? How might more-than-human beings communicate?