The impact of human activities is putting our carbon sinks including forests, grasslands, rangelands,
and agricultural farmlands under thread of extinction. To counteract the destruction of these
life supporting ecosystems,
the sustainable HCI community has advocated for the design of
tools and interfaces that support conservation efforts. However, to ensure
the practical success of these efforts,
there is a need to understand how real world
users of these tools might perceive and utilize them, and
how their goals, values, and constraints might affect the design of
technological solutions for the environmental crisis. In this work,
we present the results from a qualitative user study comprising 14
semi-structured interviews with subject matter experts from different domains of ecological
restoration, including agriculture, wildfire management, postfire reforestation,
and
rangeland management. We used a novel bio-inspired tool called the 'e-seed'
as a research probe in our study to
present the interviewees with a tangible example of an autonomous
reforestation tool and elicit creative ideas from them on how or where technology
can be used.
There are two main contributions of our study.
First,
we report a core set of existing challenges, application opportunities,
and economic and regulatory hurdles for technology in natural and
semi natural ecosystems. Second, we present design considerations
for HCI researchers for building and deploying novel devices
and interfaces in nature and discuss implications for future research
in ecological restoration. We believe that this work will help HCI
researchers identify user needs and discern opportunities for environment
centric work within HCI and help them understand the constraints
affecting the design of conservation technology. By following the design guidelines
presented in this work, HCI practitioners can solve for a
diverse set of environmental problems and ensure success in terms
of scalability and adoption. Our participants included 14
subject matter experts from North America working on different facets
of ecological restoration. After defining our key research questions and recruiting
our participants,
we conducted semi-structured interviews with them. We generated and
anonymized our transcripts and followed a thematic analysis approach in which we qualitatively coded the
data and created code groups that were later grouped into themes.
Of our seven code groups, three, namely 'challenges with
current practices', 'application areas', and 'feasibility'
were directly transformed into themes,
whereas the other four were grouped into the larger
theme of 'technology features and design considerations'.
We saw that when it came to challenges with current practices, dominance of invasive species, expensive
and hazardous postfire restoration, ineffective wildfire management
systems, and unsustainable agricultural practices were key issues facing land
managers and growers. Our interviews revealed that technology has a
key role to play in solving for current challenges in
ecological management. Specifically, technology that promotes growth and
re-establishment of native species and endangered pollinators and allows for
targeted delivery of herbicides was deemed crucial to tackle the invasive
species problem. Tools that could accelerate postfire revegetation and
allow for landscape monitoring were thought of as important to
restore burned habitats. For wildfire risk management, early detection
systems with a high temporal and spatial accuracy, and tools
that could inform prescribed burns were of value. Finally, novel planting tools
and technology that allowed for subsoil delivery of materials were
highly merited in agricultural management.
We also saw that for technology to be adopted, scaled,
and taken seriously by land managers,
it needs to be aligned with current legislation and regulatory
policies. Presenting trial data with superior performance and cost benefits,
conforming to stakeholder objectives, and taking values at risk into account
were other important factors to ensure the real-world applicability and
feasibility of the technology. Our last theme, 'technology features and
design considerations', highlighted important design guidelines for HCI practitioners
looking to create tools and interfaces for ecological restoration.
We learned that by coupling different sensory and imaging toolkits together such as a
combination of aerial imagery with ground truthing, or by using
novel visual indicators to create
high-tech monitoring systems, technology designers can increase the dimensionality
of environmental data. Additionally, by designing direct actuation
mechanisms that support the delivery of payloads in the soil
or that respond to environmental stimuli to trigger a response, designers
can create a more holistic ecological toolkit that is currently
dominated by sensory devices. To enable resilience in large
scale unmanned deployment scenarios, practitioners need to design for
mechanical integrity and energy efficiency and build fallback mechanisms to account for unpredictable
environmental effects. We also saw that to account for differences in soil types, geography, terrain,
climate, and other local conditions, designers need to build
flexibility into their devices to be able to adapt to
different environments and users. While
the design of novel systems was encouraged by our experts,
we learned that sometimes,
leveraging and augmenting existing tools and technology can enable faster,
and easier adoption of technology in environmental settings, especially by
conservative users. When designing technology for environmental
applications, many of our experts suggested taking guidance from evolutionary
principles in nature and mimicking features present in naturally occurring species and
processes to create resource efficient, adaptable, fault tolerant, and
scalable devices.
Finally,
we saw that biodegradability and compatibility with nature were seen as
crucial elements for tools that needed to be deployed for
long periods of time in natural ecosystems. Bio-resorbable materials,
electronic-free designs, and mechanisms that could enable retrieval of
non-biodegradable elements from the landscape after the duration of
use were seen the highly valuable. Aside from the challenges,
technology applications, feasibility concerns, and design guidelines reported
in our work, our interviews
also emphasized the importance of engaging diverse stakeholders in all
stages of the design process for future sustainable HCI
research. Additionally, HCI researchers working on conservation technology
need to take into account both the ecological history, as well
as the changing ecological profile of the landscape in question.
As such, technology design should aim to promote resilient ecosystems,
and ensure the persistence of key environmental entities
and assist post disturbance recovery in damaged ecosystems.
Ultimately, our research hopes to inspire future efforts in
the service of producing more viable human-nature interaction.