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This workshop invites researchers, designers, and practitioners from across HCI to explore how interactive technologies might contribute positively to human-forest interactions, and what it might mean for such technologies to plurally “get it right”.
We begin from the premise that technology can both enrich and harm forest ecologies: it may help us notice, sense, and connect in new ways, but it may also foster alienation or commodification if designed uncritically. Through research-through-design, in the workshop we will share forest stories via boundary objects, co-create a metaphorical “shared forest” exhibition, draw on diverse HCI knowledges to speculatively prototype technologies responding to these stories, and reflect on the promising design directions that emerge. Our aim is not to identify a single “right way”, but to surface plural, situated directions that feel worth pursuing.
The outcome of the workshop will be an archive (both digital and tangible) of stories and artefacts brought to, made at, and discussed during the workshop. Building on that, we will work toward and a portfolio of speculative prototypes of forest technologies that “get it right”, annotated with the stories and knowledge(s) that gave rise to them. We hope these outcomes will consolidate as intermediate-level knowledge that inspire future design/research in the space of forest-related technology and sheds light on possible ways of making positive impact.
