Mapping new Terrains in Sustainable HCI: Land/Body Doubling and Justice-Oriented Critical Posthuman Subjectivities
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Biggs, Heidi
- Graduate Program:
- Informatics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 27, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Dongwon Lee, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Daniel Susser, Major Field Member
Audrey Desjardins, Special Member
Eduardo Navas, Outside Unit & Field Member
Shaowen Bardzell, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Yubo Kou, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Human Computer Interaction
Interaction Design
Design Research
Sustainable Human Computer Interaction
Climate Change
Anthropocene Era
Wetlands
Design Fiction
Climate Justice - Abstract:
- This dissertation uses embodied, historical, speculative, and critical making methods to contribute to the emerging posthuman agenda in human computer interaction (HCI) and its intersections with sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI). For several years now, there has been a move in SHCI research to design to reconfigure the entanglements of human and non-human to address climate change and The Anthropocene Era (the name for a geologic era where humans are the leading cause of change on earth) and design to decenter the human. However, SHCI research has barely addressed the disparate outcomes of climate change or study how human/non-human entanglements are also tied to logics of human/human oppression. Therefore, in my dissertation, I offer the provocation of Land/Body doubling. Land/body doubling was inspired by a medical procedure I went through which radically shifted how I viewed land relations and land histories of wetlands in the American Midwest. Inspired by the work of queer ecofeminist, building off my own prior research about historic redlining, I started to see cuts in my own body, cuts in land, land use histories, historic data practices, and racialized geographies, as connected to binary logics of human/non-human separation. Land/body doubling is built from the methodological/theoretical building blocks of two prior studies. The first examines the practice of posthuman design, and the new orientations to HCI research that are possible when a designer inhabits a threshold with non-human others. The second project uses cross-disciplinary discussions to layer mappings – mapping histories of redlining, a racialized historic data practice, onto present-day sustainability issues in Indianapolis, IN. Land/body doubling combines these two approaches by inhabiting a threshold with lands and mapping body histories through place-based land histories of floods and wetlands in the American Midwest. Drawing on traditions of design fiction in HCI, I illustrate land/body doubling using three annotated short stories which are scaffolded on historic research and my lived experiences from trips I took to visit historic wetlands. Through these stories, I draw together the relations of land, body, and data which cut across land and bodies, via logics of use, production, and reproductivity. I then outline the possibility of finding ourselves ‘cut together’ by those same cuts into heterogeneous collective bodies. I reflect on the need for designing not only to see sustainability and climate change as environmental, but also social and economic, and ask how we might design to unsettle the orientations that seem to lead to disparate unsustainable futures.