Authors:
Maurizio Teli, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Ann Light
Reworlding is a European doctoral network funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. It is designed to challenge conventional interpretations of interaction design (IxD) research, supporting just and sustainable futures in a historical period defined by, and contributing to, climate change. Global warming is threatening many of the current life-forms inhabiting Earth and requires design practices to shift quickly to build networks for exchange, solidarity, inspiration, and collaboration. Composed of scholars who care about participatory design (PD), our Reworlding network aims to update the practice and offer what is needed for contemporary PD researchers to shift, strengthen, and redirect their collaborative efforts to responsibly inhabit a climate change–ridden world. We must consider together what that means for research practices. The network includes organizations in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland, along with scholars in PD, architecture, the philosophy of technology, and sociology.
Insights
→ We refer to "climate" as a set of eco-social relations, and research as a means to favor a climate that decreases the role of humans in global warming.
→ The Reworlding doctoral network focuses on deepening, shifting, and creating methods and practices for more-than-human participation by attending to four capabilities: retracing, reconnecting, reimagining, and reinstitutioning.
Reworlding is heavily inspired by the work of the late Bruno Latour. He pointed to the need to find new ways of relating to Earth when discussing ecology and how human activities like research are part of it. Following Latour, the proponents of Reworlding— including the three of us—stress the importance of being "down to earth" [1,2], that theory should follow empirical realities and not be imposed on them. Therefore, the Latourian premise of Reworlding pushes us, among other things, to question what we call "climate change."
We propose three ways of questioning the expression "climate change": the relationship between IxD and the causes of climate change, IxD's contribution in dealing with the consequences of climate change, and how IxD practices change when we take into account the causes and consequences of climate change.
- The first item points directly to research in IxD on sustainable practices supported by computing and on the reduced ecological impacts of hardware and software [1]. The focus is on computer-related human actions that contribute to the ecological processes changing the climate.
- The second item refers to research addressing the consequences of changes in climate. These include more frequent natural disasters, migration driven by reduced economic opportunities, armed conflict, and negative impact on the more-than-human elements (e.g., water, food, minerals).
- The third way of questioning starts with the acknowledgment that the climate has already changed and is changing life on Earth as a result of human actions (and, consequently, IxD research is also changing). When any research deals with a changed climate that affects life conditions, there is a need to conceptualize and investigate the set of situated relations between the changes that have already happened and those happening at the moment. Therefore, we suggest not only thinking about climate as referring to the meteorological conditions but also thinking about how it is used and understood in the expression "creating a climate." This would be to consider climate as a set of eco-social relations [3] that favors certain actions rather than others, leading us to rethink what it is to be human and how we share our substance with other living beings.
Questioning the expression "climate change" opens up a new set of questions for the IxD community, such as What kind of actions are favored by the eco-social climate in relation to the technologies we research and design? Can IxD research support the transformation from climate-changing practices to creating a climate promoting eco-social justice while decreasing the role of humans in global warming? Refined and alternative research methods and practices are needed to answer the latter question, which we explore in Reworlding through four capabilities (Figure 1) that PD and IxD researchers should develop to actually get "down to earth" [2] and to create the climate to change climate change.
 | Figure 1. The four Reworlding capabilities in connection with the key methods adopted. |
Retracing focuses on situated research, emphasizing the importance of tracing eco-social challenges through direct and caring engagements with case studies. This approach aims to rethink and advance traditional methods of observation and data collection, adapting them to eco-social issues to support a more careful, situated, and pluralistic engagement. The goal is to surface knowledge about human and more-than-human practices of care for eco-social challenges. To do so, members of the network trace and map the practices, strategies, and capabilities used by different actors to address eco-social challenges, with the goal of articulating marginalized perspectives and Reworlding ambitions.
The doctoral researchers following this theme in the network focus on four different empirical domains through which retracing capabilities can be strengthened: neurodiversity inclusion strategies, social housing transitions, platform cooperative models, and precarious self-employment. For example, by engaging with international residents in Aalborg, Denmark, to investigate the possibility for a platform cooperative that provides food, one doctoral researcher found herself working in agriculture, job services, and immigration law, observing daily practices and cultural differences in these domains.
Reconnecting aims to develop capabilities that bring diverse actors together and make their design concerns matters of public discussion while fostering solidarity with marginalized world experiences. It focuses on how design capabilities can support connecting actors and building alliances over shared concerns to act upon eco-social urgencies. The core idea is to bridge the gaps between different sectors, disciplines, and actors, enabling them to reframe their ideas and practices of eco-social transformation. This involves understanding diverse perspectives and facilitating negotiations to achieve common goals.
To do so, practical and conceptual tools can help us grasp the diverse possible understandings of eco-social transformation: The researchers will create translation objects to help connect actors around transformation goals [4]. Three doctoral projects are related to reconnecting; their focus is on urban social renewal, urban cultural heritage, and sustainable work platforms. For instance, one student working with Malmö University and in Italy researches cocreated festivals that have an eco-social theme, looking to what extent their focus and rhythms (i.e., their transience and recurrence) work to change people's engagement with environmental and social issues around them. The festivals and the futures they work toward are instances of micro- and macro-reworlding.
The Reworlding network is designed to challenge conventional interpretations of interaction design research.
Reimagining critically examines how the material environment has been designed in ways that foster unsustainable practices and exclude less powerful human and more-than-human actors. The capability seeks to redefine design as world-making, helping us rethink past models and propose alternatives where different—multiple and pluralist—worlds can fit. The focus is on creating novel spatial and organizational conditions to share knowledge and foster solidarity. Empirically, the doctoral researchers are working on reimagining regenerative urban practices, community-driven transformations of the built environment, the repurposing of industrial sites, and spaces of collective learning. These projects, such as the two focusing on socially just neighborhood energy transitions, will analyze and interpret learning and imaginative practices, resulting in workshops, tools, and prototypes (e.g., public installations) for different contexts.
Finally, all researchers in the Reworlding network are engaging with the "reinstitutioning" capability. Reinstitutioning aims to ensure that the outcomes of the research are not just academic but also contribute to transforming eco-social relations beyond academia. This capability focuses on building and reshaping institutions and their connections, noting how they connect different social and ecological worlds and what beneficial changes might be possible. This reveals how design capabilities can tackle eco-social challenges at strategic and institutional levels [5], and it includes explorations on how to integrate project-specific outputs into long-term networks and programs for eco-social transition. The goal is to integrate IxD and PD research into long-term networks, institutions, and programs, leading to practical and lasting eco-social outcomes. This involves both building new institutions and engaging with existing ones, thereby creating new arenas for collective action—from privileging the cooperative organization of economic activities to urban social renewal oriented toward different water policies and practices codeveloped by policy, design, and farmer communities.
Reworlding engages with "creating a climate" as a necessity, as something needed in research and beyond.
The activities connected to reinstitutioning are the following: translating different capabilities into frameworks and policies across different scales, organizing webinars and establishing online training modules, and continually engaging with the programs that leave space for eco-social sensibilities in the European context, such as the EU's Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus. In describing these ambitions, we not only describe activities for our students and our research but also lay out a different approach to thinking about sustainable futures. This approach does not look to preserve what we have: a largely livable physical climate but with rampant social and environmental injustice. Instead it imagines something better: a cultural climate of progressive change, hope, and care that may be the only route to a physical climate within which all life can flourish. To this end, we identify questions for ourselves and anyone else similarly motivated:
- Can IxD research support the transformation from climate-changing practices to creating a climate promoting eco-social justice while decreasing the role of humans in global warming?
- How can the technologies we research and design support, enhance, and lead to the creation of this climate?
The Reworlding network is engaging with both questions—one as a premise, one as an object of investigation. Reworlding assumes that, unfortunately, most research in computing is embedded in an eco-social climate that pushes toward actions and social configurations that are mostly unsustainable and fuel global warming. Therefore, Reworlding engages with "creating a climate" as a necessity, as something needed in research and beyond to face the contradictions and negative trajectories of current eco-social configurations. As a network, we think that the role of technology in creating this climate can come from the deepening of the four Reworlding capabilities discussed here. These capabilities are not proposed as final answers but rather contributions to the much-needed collective conversation this forum aims to advance.
To open the discussion on what creating this climate can mean for the IxD community, we share a few questions that readers of this forum can ask themselves. First, what type of "climate" is your research part of and (re)creating today? Is it engaging with the processes and the actors changing the climate, the consequences of a changing climate for humans and more-than-human entities, or the transformation of IxD research in the face of climate change? Next, what are the situated empirical domains from which your IxD research can learn the most, and how can those empirical domains be approached to be better understood? How can IxD research contribute to the construction of the capabilities necessary to create a climate for eco-social justice? Lastly, how can we turn research results into long-lasting outcomes that exist beyond the academic domain?
Acknowledgments
The Reworlding project has received funding from the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation—Horizon Europe, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Networks under the grant agreement 101119451.
References
1. Huybrechts, L. et al. Reworlding: Participatory design capabilities to tackle socio-environmental challenges. Proc. of the Participatory Design Conference 2022. ACM, 2 (2022), 173–178; https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537870
2. Latour, B. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, 2018.
3. Light, A. et al. Eco-social change and eco-social futures. CreaTures Frameworks, 2022; https://creaturesframework.org/eco-social-change-and-eco-social-futures.html
4. Seravalli, A. and Witmer, H. (Service) design and organisational change: Balancing with translation objects. International Journal of Design 15, 3 (2021), 73–86.
5. Huybrechts, L., Benesch, H., and Geib, J. Institutioning: Participatory design, co-design and the public realm. CoDesign 13, 3 (2017), 148–159.
Authors
Maurizio Teli is an associate professor in the Techno-Anthropology and Participation research group at Aalborg University in Denmark. His participatory design work focuses on the political dimensions of computing. His interests include design practices aimed at promoting eco-social justice, with a particular attention to the organization of social cooperation in a sustainable way. [email protected]
Liesbeth Huybrechts is a professor with the ArcK research group at Hasselt University in Belgium. Her work focuses on participatory design, design anthropology, and environmental transformation processes, with research interests that include designing for/with participatory exchanges and capacity-building processes between humans and the material/natural environment. [email protected]
Ann Light is an interaction theorist and professor of design at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and at Malmö University in Sweden. She specializes in participatory practice, human-technology relations, and collaborative future-making. Her U.K.-based fellowship examines the role of immersive participatory techniques in eco-social change. [email protected]
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