Hello CHI friends. My name is Jeffrey Bardzell, and on behalf of my coauthors Shaowen Bardzell and
Ann Light, I present our paper, Wanting to Live Here: Design After Anthropocentric Functionalism.
The planet is facing ecological crisis. Industrialization—which
extracts the Earth’s materials in exchange for economic value—is
implicated in that crisis. As a discipline, HCI often perpetuates these practices.
Sustainable HCI researchers argue that HCI must do more than help individual
consumers tweak their behaviors. Instead, as Escobar writes,
we need “a significant reorientation of design from the functionalist, rationalistic,
and industrial traditions from which it emerged, and within which it still functions at ease,
towards a type of rationality and set of practices attuned to the relational dimension of life”.
We see HCI as in a bind: we need to be designerly enough to rethink and remake our world,
but an element most in need of change is the nature of designing itself.
What we are calling “anthropocentric functionalism”–the pursuit of
efficiency and a human-centered appropriation of the world’s resources–lies
at the heart of what has been wrong with design, so we will need an alternative.
In this respect, we see agricultural practices as both a topic of study for applying HCI
and a helpful analogy. Like HCI, agriculture requires intervention: it is tied to environmental
un-sustainability and, if/when it fails, it leads to mass starvation and political instability.
Yet agriculture is also a site of hope. Its relatively low barriers to entry and openness
to experimentation makes it amenable to widespread, bottom-up discovery.
We the authors have in the past separately worked with the theoretical concerns of this essay—HCI
and care, posthumanism, and environmental justice—and we now come together to pool
insights for the field. In doing so, we examine a number of cases from fieldwork not as sites that
HCI might support with technology, but rather as sites that project alternative possible futures,
even if in a fragmented and imperfect way.
I’ll very quickly sketch 2 of the cases we discuss in the paper.
In doing so, we also want to acknowledge the contributions of Cyn Liu.
One of the farmers we visited in Yilan was Chen Xing-Yan,
who introduced us to his concept of a “garden forest”
The garden forest is a polyculture garden, where hundreds of species of crops, flowers,
trees, and weeds grow harmoniously together,
though the garden looks more like a wasteland than a farm at first glance.
To Xing-Yan, weeding is not about removing all the non-crop plants,
but selectively targeting species which have accelerated growth cycles.
Nearby in the same village, the Land Dyke collective holds several farming parcels,
one of which is devoted to what they call Abandoned Farming.
The goal was to do planting during the spring in a way that the farm could “self-regulate”
so well that it could produce crops without any further human intervention.
In other words, after planting, the farm is abandoned until it is time to harvest.
As the Land Dyke farmer explained,
The key “is in identifying crops that are strong enough to compete with invasive weeds
in the fields to survive extreme heat and humidity in the summer in Taiwan”
Later that summer, she returned to her abandoned farm to discover that
under the weeds that her farm was filled with vegetables,
including, in her words, “a small, ugly, insect-bitten,
yet nonetheless completely edible loofah.”
Abandoned farms and garden forests do not seek to clear aside natural processes in
a well defined and human-controlled agricultural space. They let nature,
rather than chemical pesticides and fertilizers, do some of the work. Yet both still require at
least some human intervention. Both entail a human-nature collaboration
These cases and others helped us to respond to HCI’s bind—to be designerly
enough to rethink and remake our world, but also to redesign design itself. We
do so by rejecting certain dimensions of design practice in the left column,
such as Simon’s separation of the natural and artificial worlds; and by preserving other
features of design in the right column, including design’s ability to create symbols of change.
In this shortened presentation, we cannot offer all of our arguments,
but we do offer the following take-homes: HCI should More intentionally design resources
that are place-based and sharable by all those who share the space, i.e., relational assets.
Leverage HCI’s own resources to advance the field—not to retreat into a nostalgic
past—so as to support flourishing biosystems. HCI designers should factor
land usage and interspecies relations into any consideration of IT development and deployment.
Thank you very much, and with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions.