Heidi Biggs

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Food Traceability Rule, promulgated as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), requires agri-food supply chain stakeholders (stakeholders) —including farmers, fishers, retail workers, and others—to maintain detailed tracking records beginning in January 2026. Through this Rule, the FDA envisions a “New Era of Tech-Enabled Traceability,” in which standardized, harmonized tracking data serve as a foundational public health infrastructure, enabling more rapid identification and removal of potentially contaminated food and ultimately reducing the risk of foodborne illness. Despite this promising vision, we observe that the Rule reconfigures agri-food stakeholders into data laborers by mandating stringent data-collection, formatting, and reporting requirements. In this paper, we examine the tensions and burdens that arise from such reconfiguration. Leveraging Data Feminism as an orientation to attend to how data-driven policy implementation disproportionately burdens smaller, under-resourced stakeholders who lack the infrastructural and financial capacity to comply, we analyze 1,198 public comments submitted to Regulations.gov in response to the proposed Rule. Our qualitative document analysis reveals three key tensions: (1) the individual labor, financial, and educational burdens stakeholders experience as they are reconfigured into data workers; (2) moments where data tracking becomes infeasible due to infrastructural limitations, cultural contexts, and situated production practices; and (3) instances where the Rule’s intended flexibility instead introduces confusion and burden due to its ambiguity. This work contributes to CSCW by providing an empirical account of how data-driven policy reconfigures stakeholders as data producers. We demonstrate that those reconfigured as data workers under data-driven governance must be recognized as meaningful policy partners rather than merely as actors subjected to compliance obligations. We further suggest that CSCW can play a critical role in uncovering their yet invisible burdens, supporting their capacity to voice concerns through participatory democratic mechanisms, and aiding their ability to “make-do” under imposed data works.

Amid growing environmental concerns, more-than-human (MtH) design has gained traction in HCI as a means of attending to relational entanglements between humans and the wider ecological world. This work is vitally important, but draws largely on (and is perhaps limited by) Western philosophical traditions. In this workshop, we seek to explore beyond Western ontologies in MtH design by engaging with longstanding practices and epistemologies such as Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Eastern philosophies like Daoism. These non-Western knowledge traditions have long embodied relational worldviews grounded in lived, place-based practices of interdependence with the more-than-human world. We aim to share stories and philosophies of multispecies entanglements, discuss the ethics of drawing from these knowledge systems in HCI, and imagine new ways these situated understandings can inform design. In doing so, we seek to expand the ethical, epistemological, and design imaginaries of MtH work toward more pluralistic, culturally grounded forms of interactivity.

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, workshop participants 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. Outcomes will include a digital archive of stories and artefacts and an annotated portfolio of speculative prototypes to inspire future design/research.