Henry Collingham

Big Tech, Big Agri, and agri-tech start-ups promise us that digital technologies will make agriculture more sustainable, painting high-tech visions of sensors, AI, and autonomous drones and robots running the data-driven farm. However, many such visions just reinforce the existing unsustainable industrial production paradigm. Since smallholder farms continue to produce most of thew world’s food, we ask in this work-in-progress: What can we learn from them about the design of appropriate and responsible digital farming technologies? We report tentative findings from an ongoing engagement with smallholder farmers in Northern England, UK. We present six tensions related to the relationship between technology and farming practices and the nature of technologies themselves. We develop a set of values for design for nature-friendly and community-based smallholder agriculture and propose three unfinished evocative design speculations, which we plan to develop further and use in co-design work with farmers going forward.

Mariana's Song is a multisensory experience for care home residents unable to take part in regular activities. Designed to support Personhood through a blended physical/digital installation, it is a user-led experience, centered around video and closely facilitated in concert with expert arts practitioners. The narrative and duration of the interaction is guided by each resident, unique on each viewing, which includes ‘sensory props’ that guide each resident's experience and stimulate the senses to create a transformative space. We provide a worked example of digital, physical, and spatial design decisions taken to reinforce Personhood for residents with advanced dementia. We present learnings from 106 sessions, facilitated one to one between Artists and residents. We contribute to the literature around designing to Materialize Personhood, informed by Kitwood's 12 key characteristics, as well as Parametricism, a novel approach to non-linear experiences, to support the unique needs of people with advanced dementia.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote support for Eating Disorders (ED), necessitating innovative integration of digital technologies. The RHED-C (Remote Healthcare for Eating Disorders throughout COVID-19) project builds upon insights from the pandemic to enhance future remote care. Co-designed animation was used as an ethnographic method, capturing experiences of support recipients. Creative workshops generated ideas and guided script/storyboard creation. Unique challenges to the application of animation were unveiled, emphasising careful visual representation of EDs, with a focus towards abstract representation and audio. The animation features voiceovers exclusively by individuals with lived experience. The implications of animation in this space are two-fold: Firstly, as an impactful way to disseminate findings beyond academia, raising awareness of remote support advantages and challenges. Secondly, as an inclusive approach capturing diverse forms of expression and individual preference. An accompanying documentary details the process, advocating for responsible application of co-designed animation in HCI research.

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

Sustainability has never been more critical for DIS researchers. Within the DIS and HCI community, the term has multiple meanings: In sustainable HCI, it frequently refers to ecologically sustainable lifestyles through the design of interactive systems and to sustainability in HCI practice itself. Conversely, community-based HCI speaks of the sustainability of HCI, referring to the longevity of our socio-technical interventions. This workshop seeks to bring together these seemingly different conceptions of sustainability to explore their commonalities. Arguably, longevity is important for sustainable HCI, as is ecological impact for community-based HCI. We invite participants from diverse fields, such as sustainable HCI, HCI4D, Community-Based Participatory Design, and Digital Civics to reflect on past and current work, develop best practice recommendations, and design sustainability roadmaps to help researchers and designers to conceive, run, and evaluate future projects with sustainability through, in, and of HCI in mind.