Motivation & Background

In a time of ecological crisis and rapid technological development, the role of interactive technology in shaping how people relate to the natural world has become an urgent and contested matter. HCI has a growing tradition of addressing human-nature relations, with strands of research anchored in diverse subcommunities such as more-than-human design [35], sustainable HCI [27], technology design for the outdoors [26], exertion technology [28], playful design [1], or slow technology [30], to name a few.

Within this heterogeneous and rapidly evolving landscape, a growing body of work explores how technology might mediate human encounters with(in) forests. Researchers have approached this from myriad angles, for example: looking at how to situate sense-making of forests and forest experiences within forests themselves [11]; exploring how might we support human-forest interactions that balance human joy with more-than-human care [2]; designing technologies that support slow, mindful ways for humans to notice and make sense of forests and forest-related experiences [15][19][21][22][30][36];  discussing how designers can engage forest ecologies to better attend to posthuman perspectives [9]; or problematizing the very notion of “smartness” in the context of forests [13]. Cutting across these diverse contributions, we see a shared ambition to support humans in accessing rich lived experiences within forests, cultivate meaningful and resilient human-forest relationalities, and/or imbue these more-than-human entanglements with reciprocity and care. We situate this workshop within that emerging research area.

We begin from the premise that interactive technology has the potential to enrich human-forest encounters, if designed thoughtfully and sensitively. Many of its qualities hold promise for the human-forest interplay: technology can enable asynchronous or remote forms of communication that would otherwise be impossible [8]; it can allow us to reproduce, manipulate, or duplicate physical objects digitally [17]; it can make it possible to store, retrieve, and play with rich layers of data [4]; or it can heighten our capacity to notice [24] and sense [12][29]; among many other promising traits. Yet, as many have warned in recent times, technology use in forests can also bring harm, for example: narrow, input-output designs risk compromising the experiential richness of being in the forest [33]; technologies that substitute direct engagement with forests can foster alienation from the more-than-human world, with negative consequences for both human well-being and for ecological health [33]; or designs that primarily position forests as resources for human consumption risk exacerbating anthropocentric understandings that damage ecosystems [34].

Together, these examples illustrate how designing technology targeting forests can have ambivalent effects: it can nurture rich, exciting more-than-human interactions as much as (if designed uncritically) it can instrumentalize, commodify, or reduce the complexity of human-nature interconnectedness, ultimately compromising the human-forest interplay.

That ambivalence speaks to the diffractive (i.e., multifaceted, overlapping, non-linear [5]) nature of technology mediation in more-than-human worlds. Technology use is not inherently good or bad, enriching or damaging, a promise or a risk – that is true for forests [33] and beyond [18]. Rather, it operates on a complex shade of greys, lending itself to a multiplicity of affordances, exchanges, and effects. In this context, the challenge we face as a technology design and research community is to avoid solutionist approaches, transcend anthropocentric perspectives, and critically engage with our practice with the aim of getting it right – creating technologies that contribute positively to human-forest relationships, and paying attention to (and addressing) new forms of harm that might emerge. 

Aligning with calls (in more-than-human design research and beyond) for exploring what this challenge means in practice (e.g., [7][16]), we have an interest in exploring the design space of forest-related technology both critically [6][31] and generatively [14]. It is not enough to understand and mitigate what harms might come from designing forest-related technologies. It is also important to envision what positive impacts emerge when pivoting attention to care. For us to advance this design space, we need to carve design directions that make explicit the possible roles we can take in forest ecologies. This comes with a set of (we argue, very timely) questions:

What might it mean to design forest-related technologies “the right ways”?

What are these “right ways”, assuming they are likely polyhedric and situated, and who gets to decide them?

How might we leverage our diverse existing knowledges in HCI to support the design of these human-technology-forest assemblages, and what might we currently be missing that we should look out for elsewhere?

What technologies might result from these design processes, and what might they look and feel like?

What should such technologies seek to accomplish in the first place?

And what can we do to introduce them in real forest ecosystems in ways that enrich, rather than erode, our interactions within forests? 

These questions feel urgent: technology use in forests is beginning to gain traction, yet it still remains in an incipient implementation stage. The design space is still underdeveloped, and so is the industry that will inevitably grow around it. This offers a timely (and ephemeral) opportunity to consolidate the design space of forest-related technologies and orient it toward positive paths. With this workshop, we aim to carve out space for such a conversation by sharing present and future forest stories as an opportunity to foster a situated discussion on the opportunities and risks of incorporating technology in the human-forest interplay. We will bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in technologies that mediate human interactions with(in) natural environments – particularly forests, but also encompassing broader and more fluid notions of what “a forest” might be. Our goal is to foster a diverse exchange among HCI researchers from different communities (i.e., including those within, but also beyond more-than-human design), with diverse lived experiences of forests, and with differing perspectives on the human-technology-forest interplay.

The workshop will be structured as a research through design [14] conversation with primarily generative [14] ambitions. We will lean on techniques of speculation [3], fiction [10], and fabulation [20] to ensure our hands-on, materially-rich discussions are also approached through a critical lens – assuming generativity and criticality not as opposing but rather as reinforcing. Through a range of designerly activities, we will surface layers of human-forest interactions that are worth cultivating, critically reflect on how these entanglements should be approached and designed for, and creatively explore how interactive technology might contribute to them in ways that feel desirable. We will combine hands-on activities with spaces for reflexive discussion, and we will draw on our academic expertise(s) in HCI (theoretical, methodological, designerly, or other) to collectively imagine and prototype technologies that could nurture forms of human-forest entanglement that feel worth cultivating by design.

The outcome will be a portfolio of speculative prototypes that embody possible positive roles technology might play in human-forest interactions, annotated through the lived experiences that motivated them as well as the HCI concepts that were used to give them form. Beyond this material outcome, the workshop will create a space for multidisciplinary connections. Our broader ambition is to foster a community around designing technologies with and for human-forest interconnectedness, one that includes but is not exclusively anchored in more-than-human design. We hope the workshop will inspire new collaborations and chart emerging directions for HCI design and research in this exciting area.

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