Hi: I am Heidi Biggs, PhD student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at
Penn State University.
I am presenting Watching Myself Watch Birds: Abjection, Ecological Thinking, and Posthuman
Design on behalf of our entire research team, composed of myself and co-authors Jeffrey
Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell.
The following presentation is high-level due to time constraints, but we encourage you
to read the paper in full for more detailed accounting.
As the first author, I conducted the autoethnographic research on bird watching, but all of us discussed,
reflected on, and wrote up the autoethnographic findings collaboratively.
The work is supported by NSF # 1900722.
This project was inspired by a walk I took days after I moved to Bloomington, Indiana
from Seattle, Washington.
It was the middle of winter and I saw a cardinal and a bluejay perched on a bare branch.
These two birds were different than the birds I was used to seeing on the west coast.
Inspired by a workshop I had just attended about noticing as a method for design and
by the novel birds of the midwest, I decided to do a project about bird watching, underscored
by posthuman theory in order to reflect on more-than-human arts of noticing as a method
for design.
To do this, I created an autoethnographic birdwatching practice where I would watch,
audio record and take field notes about birds on a semi regular basis.
In order to reflect on my experiences, my autoethnography also included journaling and
making practices.
When these activities were analyzed after several months of data collection, our research
team came to a novel observation.
Unexpectedly, we noticed that by dedicating myself to bird watching in a posthuman way,
at least initially, I found birds overwhelming, strange and alien.
We concluded this feeling could be described as abjection, an idea which was in part inspired
by ecological philosopher Timothy Morton (note).
Abjection is a feminist psyoanalytic concept developed by Bulgarian-French feminist philosopher
Julia Kristeva.
Abjection, according to Kristeva, is a primal and visceral rejection of things that were
once part of the self, a rejection that is made by the self to establishing the self.
It is often described as the revulsion or nausea that accompanies seeing viscera or
puss which are vile substances rejected from the body.
In this paper, we leverage the concept of abjection to unpack our ethnographic work,
illustrating the shift of the human/non-human relationship from a subject/object relationship
to a subject/abject relationship.
A subject object/relationship represents the subjective self in relation to an objective
‘other’, On the other hand a subject/abject relationship recognizes an other as a part
of ones’ self which is rejected to define one’s self through rejection.
Such a move radically imagines more-than-humans as an ecological part of humans that humans
have rejected to constitute themselves.
This led us to reflect on the difficult psychological work required for humans to begin to attend
differently to the relationships between themselves and non-humans.
So what does this mean for HCI and design?
Throughout our paper, we show several possibilities.
In our findings section, I offer vignettes that show the transition from birds as abject
toward an experience I had of visiting a swamp and conducting field recordings there.
This experience was a culmination of my sensitization to birds and more-than-human influence.
I was finally an ecological insider.
This was due to letting myself be susceptible and driven by my desire to be pulled toward
non-human voices and ecological places.
At the swamp, I described my ‘field of experience’ as broadened by deep listening, humid air,
vibrant greens, buzzing insects and growling frogs.
I felt myself dissolve a bit.
In the discussion we suggest that making practices and sound are valuable tools for design research
which explore ecological posthumanism, that ‘back brain’ noticing might open doors
for critiquing cognitive norms through designing for alternative fields of experience, and
finally we reflect on how imagining the sensory experiences of technologies has implications
for design.
In the face of climate crisis, as more and more design scholars seek ways to decenter
the human in design, this project is an early attempt at refining noticing as a method for
posthuman awareness and looking for novel design strategies for designing for posthuman
experiences.