Thank you for coming to this talk. My name is Bill Tomlinson. I am presenting on behalf
of my co-authors Bonnie Nardi, Dan Stokols, and Ankita Raturi.
Our paper is titled "Ecosystemas: Representing Ecosystem Impacts in Design"
The Earth is facing escalating environmental challenges involving climate change and other
impacts of human energy use, as well as biodiversity loss and many other issues.
Design processes shape how humans impact the Earth, and as such play an important role in
how these environmental issues have unfolded in the past, and will unfold in the future.
Designers sometimes use a construct called a persona - a distilled model of a particular user
group – to help represent the interests of that user group in design processes.
Nevertheless, while design researchers have pioneered novel approaches to personas such
as animal personas, the interests of the Earth’s ecosystems are largely absent from design efforts.
We propose that it may be useful to have a construct analogous to personas
to represent ecosystems in design processes. We call this construct an ecosystema.
Here we see an example of an ecosystema for the Amazon Rainforest
that our team mocked up. It includes a user story and various other pieces of
content that can help designers keep this ecosystem in mind as they engage in design.
The concept of ecosystemas builds on several major threads of past work.
It builds on ideas from social ecology about the relationships between humans and non-humans.
It builds on concepts from design research, such as the animal personas mentioned earlier
as well as other efforts to decenter humans and explore the role of nonhumans in design.
It also fits within the growing area within HCI exploring how our
field relates to sustainability and environmental topics more broadly.
We anticipate that the concept of ecosystemas could influence designers to take ecosystem
impacts into account throughout the design process. This could allow ecosystem-wide
impacts to influence design processes more effectively, and provide greater leverage
on current environmental crises than existing human-centered techniques. This approach to design
could help contribute to a future in which the ecosystems humans rely on for our own existence
are central to the design of future sociotechnical systems in HCI and many other fields.
Ecosystemas should ideally be developed collaboratively by designers working with
biologists or ecologists, and potentially many others with relevant expertise in engineering,
business, and other fields.
A factor the team explored in the design of ecosystemas was whether a particular ecosystema
should be based on one real-world ecosystem (which we call a “simple” ecosystema) or on
a hybrid of multiple ecosystems (which we call a “composite” ecosystema). A simple ecosystema
would have all of its information drawn from a single real, spatially-delimited ecosystem.
A composite ecosystema would be based on a single real ecosystem
but potentially augmented by elements from other ecosystems (This is similar to how a persona may
include aspects of multiple real people layered together into a composite representation).
The concept of ecosystemas points to the potential need for a new role—the ecosystema
advocate. An advocate would be a person or group who has expertise about a particular ecosystema,
and could be brought in as a consultant on design efforts. In current design activities
a design team may engage with members of a target human population for various forms of
consultation such as focus groups or beta testing. However, with nonhuman stakeholders, it may not be
ethical or feasible to consult with particular nonhuman species or ecosystems. Therefore,
a human who understands the purpose of design at a high level, and who can serve as an advocate
for an ecosystema throughout the effort, would be a valuable participant in design processes.
In this article, we have presented a potential approach to design and design knowledge
that may help to reduce and reverse anthropogenic environmental harm,
in particular through the use of ecosystemas.
We hope that someday, a large enough portion of humanity will see nonhuman species as being of
sufficient inherent value to enable the deep cultural, economic, and political shifts to
bring about futures that are beneficial not just for humanity, but for all other forms of life.
This work would not have been possible without several talented undergraduate researchers
and feedback from several anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by
the Bren School of ICS at UCI, and by NSF award CCF-1442749.
Thank you very much! I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.