environment

Intelligences

Silence: Divergent Listening in the Anthropocene

Posted by  • 0 Comments

Photo of EPIC2022 attendees participating in "Silence"
GRANT CUTLER Independent Artist DOWNLOAD PDF Divergent listening describes a listening practice which seeks to raise consciousness or expand on our understanding of reality through the perception of sound. The multichannel sound installation, ‘Silence’, offers a space of quiet reflection, a place to ask questions, share, or rest. It is a room to imagine a more inclusive future, a world of resilience, energized by the clamorous singing of countless life forms. The installation invites participants to immerse themselves in the soundscapes of dozens of endangered natural environments and reflect on the change that an enhanced listening practice might bring to their own lives, work, and environments. The extremely rapid loss of biodiversity as a consequence of industrialization and climate change represents a reality-bending catastrophe. How will we return from such a departure from sustainable living? What voices will we choose to guide us? Divergent listening describes any listening practice which seeks to raise consciousness...

Intelligences

The Climate Crisis as Learning Space

Posted by  • 0 Comments

Figure 1. Photo showing totems such as figurines of a fly, a gecko, a petrified stone, a dish with a mermaid, and a tile with a centaur.
FLOOR BASTEN Independent Scholar MARC COENDERS Independent Scholar DOWNLOAD PDF It is becoming widely accepted that the climate crisis is a multiscale breakdown of interrelated ecological systems, caused by behavioural patterns that are unsustainable. As behaviours are largely informed by ideologies and as the latter are passed on by education, we submit that the climate crisis is also a crisis of learning. Our game invites participants to reflect on a variety of ways of human thinking and sensemaking, i.e. paradigms. Putting the so-called Western paradigm into perspective by presenting other ontologies and epistemologies, we challenge participants to rethink learning as situated against the backdrop of new insights into the nature of ‘situation’, an intra-emergent phenomenon in which humans and other-than-humans are agentically enmeshed (Barad, 2007). Context Societies worldwide are responsible for unsustainable lifestyles. When we trace how we got to this, we see a history in which antique Greeks’ speculations about...

Intelligences

Creating Companies and Products Conducive to Life

Posted by  • 0 Comments

Melissa Gregg presenting on stage at EPIC2022
Keynote Speaker: MELISSA GREGG, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Melissa Gregg is a senior principal engineer in user experience driving carbon reduction and green software strategy at Intel. With a Ph.D. in gender and cultural studies, she is a widely cited author, theorist, and ethnographer, with over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books. Her research has appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and CBC, and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, and Korean. Melissa joined Intel in 2013 after a career in academia. She led Intel Labs’ first university investment in the social sciences before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. In client computing, her research informed a range of initiatives to support a more flexible and agile office, women’s role in the smart home, and increasingly responsive, energy-efficient laptops (Project Athena/ Intel EVO). Her current focus is driving sustainability strategy through software and open-source...

Intelligences

Microbes That Matter

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CARRIE YURY Fjord PechaKucha Presentation—While COVID-19 has made the world hyper vigilant about sanitization, I take a bottoms-up perspective on the threats of a microbe-starved world. Telling the story of Clostridium Difficile, I walk us through how—just as in ethnography—context is everything for microbes. Using different examples from the biosphere, I examine how microbial metaphors matter, and I make the case that understanding microbes in the context of larger environments and ecosystems can help move us toward life centered design. This Pecha Kucha uses microbes as a contextual metaphor to argue that it is our responsibility to change our perspective; to decenter the human, and start designing for the health of the entire ecosystem, not just one of the players. The Pecha Kucha includes a set of experience principles for life-centered design. Carrie Yury is a Group Design Director at Accenture Interactive. She is Fjord’s National Design Research lead, responsible for leading the overall quality of design research...

Intelligences

Human Action and the Dynamic Environment

Posted by  • 0 Comments

Human Action and the Dynamic Environment
ELIZABETH CHURCHILL, Chair Google CHRIS CSIKSZENTMIHALYI Cornell University GAVIN MCCORMICK WattTime PAMELA MCELWEEN Rutgers University LIANNE YU Studio Resilience An EPIC2020 Sponsored Panel presented by Google What does human scale mean through the lens of the environment? Alternatively, what does the scale of the Earth’s environment mean to human activity and life? We may start by thinking of the enormity of the problem to just describe these two perspectives. But, by stepping back and reframing our questions in terms of the tools we use—design, ethnography, AI, art—we gain a powerful and novel perspective. Panelists discuss their work in terms of the world’s biggest threat, climate change. Approaching this topic from each one’s unique worldview and the tools of their practice, they follow out the scales of local to global and how small and seemingly one-off events can grow to a world scale. How do we design, provoke, educate—and ultimately change the world—by employing disparate data...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Integrating Sustainability Perspectives in Ethnographic Work

Posted by  • 0 Comments

MIKE YOUNGBLOOD Youngblood Group Overview This tutorial examines ways ethnography is uniquely positioned to contribute to the design and innovation of environmentally sustainable (or even better than merely sustainable) products and services. It reviews several emerging design perspectives—such as circular design, regenerative design, systems-oriented design, and value-centered design—and explores ways that ethnographers in industry can use them their own practice and organizations to build sustainability considerations into their work. It is valuable for those who are relatively new to sustainability as well as those with deeper experience who are interested in expanding our collective impact toward more planet-friendly industries. The session covers: Opportunity costs of doing design research “as usual” Key perspectives and approaches for sustainable design and innovation Baking sustainability perspectives into research Ethnographic/anthropological theories and methods that can support a sustainability...

Intelligences

Post-Human Centered

Posted by  • 0 Comments

ALICIA DUDEK, Chair Mycoreality IAN BOGOS Georgia Institute of Technology SUSAN MOYLAN COOMBS Gaimaragal Group TRICIA WANG Sudden Compass We invented our world at human height, with us in the middle. Much of our work is designed even more narrowly, with a particular kind of human at the middle. What happens when we go beyond the limited “user-centric” or “human-centric” scales? What does it look like, feel like, move like when humans are not in the middle of the system? Panelists Alicia Dudek is an experienced design ethnographer and futurist. Her work brings the customer’s point of view and human voice to any group’s innovations and decisions. The work she does with teams brings empathy into the organisation to help inform, inspire, and initiate innovation. Central to her ability as a change agent is a capability to illuminate absences of customer understanding and to build powerful projects to rally teams and decision makers around their client’s needs. She is the founder of Mycoreality,...

Intelligences

Scaling through Meaning to Action: What the Australian Bushfires Taught Me about Ethnography

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CHARLIE COCHRANE Jump the Fence PechaKucha Presentation—This PechaKucha gives a personal perspective on the ethical dilemmas around the impact of an individual's actions, and the meaning of an ethnographer's projects in the context of the scale where these play out. The story begins with the spectacle of the 2020 Australian bushfires and reflects on their enormous scale. Within this context what is the meaning of individual actions to limit global warming? The story shifts to the work context and explores the dichotomy of human impacts vs. the marketing metrics that typically measure success. Using an example of a research project with an overtly purposeful aim we explore the tension between ethnography as a tool for understanding the problem and the question of whether the scaled result truly addresses the end-users’ problem. Returning to the bushfires, we again look at the scaled government response and the question of how successfully this met the needs of those impacted. We explore the...

Intelligences

Sustainability: Addressing Global Issues At A Human Scale

Posted by  • 0 Comments

LEE RYAN More Things Considered LOUISA WOOD More Things Considered Our tiny provocation is that the word “sustainability” is not sustainable. Just using it is sabotaging our efforts to build a better future for the planet. Despite decades of global sustainability discourse, the world is still going to hell. What's gone wrong? Our paper is about willful ignorance and complicity at a global scale; the benefits of small talk; and a better, more effective word than sustainability. Article citation: 2020 EPIC Proceedings pp 300–321, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Intelligences

Agency and the Climate Emergency

Posted by  • 0 Comments

EPIC2019 Panel, Providence, Rhode Island Moderator: DAN LOCKTON, Director of the Imaginaries Lab & Chair of Design Studies, Carnegie Mellon University Panelists: MAKALÉ FABER CULLEN, Urban Soils Fellow, Anthropocene, Urban Soils Institute GYORGYI GALIK, Lead Advisor, Architecture and Built Environment Team, Design Council; Royal College of Art MIKE YOUNGBLOOD, Principal, Youngblood Group What are ethnographers’ roles in dealing with catastrophic climate crisis? Should we be exploring people’s experiences of change, trying to use our insights to help drive individual and collective action at scale through organizations, or helping civil society deal with the consequences? In this diverse set of presentations, panelists share ethnographic and design approaches to climate that engage communities, products, policy, artists, activists, and more. They examine tensions, responsibilities, and value that ethnographic practice can bring to one of the biggest issues for our collective futures....

Intelligences

Toward Donut-Centered Design: A Design Research Toolkit for the 21st Century

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CHRISTOPHER A. GOLIAS Google The social and ecological challenges of the 21st century require a design research process that contributes to viable economic solutions. This paper proposes donut centered design as a hybrid of service design and ecological design that works within the donut economic model. It describes how private and public sector ethnographers can weld the best of these two processes by providing a holistic, empirical research foundation that seeks to provide distributed service innovation value to all within the limits of the planet. Donut-centered design addresses lacunae of the current innovation models by advocating multi-site assessments, multi-species ethnography, ecosocial blueprints and holistics metrics as important components of a regenerative design research practice....

Intelligences

The Change before Behaviour: Closing the Value-Action Gap Using a Digital Social Companion

Posted by  • 0 Comments

GYORGYI GALIK Design Council & Royal College of Art This paper describes an experiment, designed and developed with the ultimate aim of fostering low-pollution and low-carbon social innovation. It offers an evidence-based practical alternative to conventional, technological approaches and narratives of smart cities aimed at sensing air pollution and mitigating the effects of climate change. In this experiment a new voice user interface is designed, developed and tested with input from participants – to explore the potential of a new, more socially minded adaptation to current AI assistant devices in the home and enhance the field of smart technology design. The experiment is developed with a group of participants to demonstrate how design research can raise novel questions and inform disciplines with an interest in behaviour change, environmental pollution and smart homes. This work demonstrates the potential for technologies to increase the degree of participation in reducing pollution in cities and facilitate the articulation...

Intelligences

Map Making: Mobilizing Local Knowledge and Fostering Collaboration

Posted by  • 0 Comments

NORA MORALES UAM Cuajimalpa, México SALOMON GONZALEZ UAM Cuajimalpa, México Participatory mapping—the production of maps in a collective way—is a common activity used for planning and decision making in urban studies. It started as a way to empower men and women, usually from rural vulnerable communities threatened by climate change, degradation of their landfills or any other conflict related to access to their land. It has been considered a fundamental instrument to help marginal groups represent and communicate their needs within the territory and augment their capacity to protect their rights. (FIDA, 2011). Why is it that in some cases participatory mapping works and in others fails? Why do these initiatives not trigger local action? Or even end up being counterproductive, when authorities use the map made by locals, to validate their points, causing conflict instead of negotiation? As a research team of designers and social scientists involved in the creation of participatory mapping workshops, our goal was to analyze...

Perspectives

What Is Going on with the Weather? Reflections on Gaps Between Data and Experience

Posted by  • 

by HANNAH KNOX, University College London If it’s summer in your part of the world (or even if it’s winter), you’ve probably been feeling the heat. On 5 July, Ouargla, Algeria recorded 51.3°C (124.3°F), the highest temperature ever reported in Africa. A few days later, Areni, Armenia hit a record 42.6°C (108.7°F), and on 17 July, Badufuss in Norway topped its charts at 33.5°C (92.3°F). Perhaps most disturbing were reports of people collapsing in the fields in Japan, where high humidity exacerbated record-breaking temperatures of over 40°C (104°F). Japan declared a natural disaster, a designation normally reserved for earthquakes and tsunamis.1 “Something is going on” – people feel – “but what?” Of course, climate scientists have been beating their drums for decades, pushing out papers, reports, and campaigns about the risks of anthropogenic climate change. But dramatic and even deadly weather events are, it turns out, rather effective at opening opportunities for speaking about climate change across...

Intelligences

What is the Value of a Perspective?

Posted by  • 0 Comments

TAYLOR FERRARI General Assembly PechaKucha Presentation How do you place a value on a perspective? Well, that depends on what you're seeking to accomplish. During this Pecha Kucha I journey of our current paradigm of Value to explore the role of the ethnographer in mediating business interests and human + planetary wellness. Outside of the metropolitan areas where can't afford to use an app to have someone come do their laundry, there lies an entire universe of perspectives that often go ignored, undervalued. What are the worldly consequences of excluding these perspectives when conducting business ethnography? Taylor Ferrari, is an applied anthropologist and systems thinker who has conducted UX Research for companies ranging from early stage startups, to Fortune 500. Deeply interested in the relationship between Structure and Agency, Taylor seeks to illuminate the ways in which organizations or entities impact humanity, and likewise how humanity feeds the existence of organizations. taymferrari@gmail.com 2017...