More-than-Human Media Architecture

We consider some of the planetary conditions and global circumstances that both research and practice of media architecture are embedded within, such as climate change, pollution, resource consumption, and loss of biodiversity. While there has been a notable increase in emphasis on participation and engagement in design and use, with the aim to increase the involvement of diverse and often marginalised citizens, a human-centred approach to media architecture comes with its own set of problems. In this paper, we want to draw the attention of the media architecture community to the fallacy of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism. We present a critical review of examples of media architecture projects and installations that question our understanding of urban space as separate from nature, and designed primarily for humans and just humans. Informed by studies in disciplines such as science and technology studies, critical geography, urban planning, and interaction design, we use insights derived from our review to discuss ways towards a more-than-human approach to media architecture. We conclude by proposing for discussion nascent design considerations for media architecture to go beyond the needs of just humans and to consider new ways to appreciate and cater for our broader ecological entanglements with plants, animals, and the environment at large.

[1]  Henrika Pihlajaniemi,et al.  Experiencing participatory and communicative urban lighting through LightStories , 2012, MAB '12.

[2]  Peter Boyce,et al.  Review: The Impact of Light in Buildings on Human Health , 2010 .

[3]  S. Pawson,et al.  LED lighting increases the ecological impact of light pollution irrespective of color temperature. , 2014, Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

[4]  B. Fogg.  The ethics of persuasive technology , 2003 .

[5]  Donna Haraway,et al.  Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , 2016 .

[6]  Erik Stolterman,et al.  Personas: from theory to practices , 2008, NordiCHI.

[7]  Paul Dourish,et al.  HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[8]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI , 2010, CHI.

[9]  H. de Kroon,et al.  More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas , 2017, PloS one.

[10]  L. Guanter,et al.  Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent , 2017, Science Advances.

[11]  Glenda Amayo Caldwell,et al.  DIY media architecture: open and participatory approaches to community engagement , 2014, MAB '14.

[12]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  Middle-out design: collaborative community engagement in urban HCI , 2016, OZCHI.

[13]  Eduardo O. Kohn,et al.  How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human , 2013 .

[14]  Janis Birkeland,et al.  Positive development and assessment , 2014 .

[15]  Christopher Frauenberger,et al.  On scale, dialectics, and affect: pathways for proliferating participatory design , 2018, PDC.

[16]  J. Atchison,et al.  Rethinking ethnobotany? A methodological reflection on human-plant research , 2017 .

[17]  Annika K. Jägerbrand,et al.  New Framework of Sustainable Indicators for Outdoor LED (Light Emitting Diodes) Lighting and SSL (Solid State Lighting) , 2015 .

[18]  C. Elvidge,et al.  Limiting the impact of light pollution on human health, environment and stellar visibility. , 2011, Journal of environmental management.

[19]  Shaowen Bardzell,et al.  Designing for Cohabitation: Naturecultures, Hybrids, and Decentering the Human in Design , 2017, CHI.

[20]  Isabelle Szmigin,et al.  Exploring the Dimensions of Ethical Consumption , 2005 .

[21]  Anna Luusua,et al.  Nonanthropocentric design and smart cities in the anthropocene , 2017, it Inf. Technol..

[22]  Oskar Juhlin,et al.  Animal-Computer Interaction: The emergence of a discipline , 2017, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[23]  Ann Morrison,et al.  A Report on the First International Workshop on Research Methods in Animal-Computer Interaction , 2017, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[24]  Matt Jones,et al.  Growth, Change and Decay: Plants and Interaction Possibilities , 2015, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[25]  Natalie Jeremijenko.  Creative Agency and the Space Race of the 21st Century: Towards a Museum of Natural Futures , 2016, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[26]  Mark P. Green,et al.  Melatonin: a possible link between the presence of artificial light at night and reductions in biological fitness , 2015, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[27]  Travis Longcore,et al.  Ecological consequences of artificial night lighting , 2006 .

[28]  Amal Abdou,et al.  The Environmental and Economical Impacts of Using Media Façades in Commercial Buildings in Egypt , 2017 .

[29]  Andrew Vande Moere,et al.  The role of context in media architecture , 2012, PerDis '12.

[30]  Roy Bendor.  Sustainability, hope, and designerly action in the anthropocene , 2018, Interactions.

[31]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  From Users to Citizens: Some Thoughts on Designing for Polity and Civics , 2015, OZCHI.

[32]  Ken Friedman,et al.  Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation , 2015 .

[33]  C. Elvidge,et al.  The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness , 2016, Science Advances.

[34]  Laura Forlano,et al.  Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities , 2016, Design Issues.

[35]  Karolina M. Zielinska-Dabkowska,et al.  Critical perspectives on media architecture: is it still possible to design projects without negatively affecting urban nighttime environments and will the future remain dynamic, bright and multi-colored? , 2014, MAB '14.

[36]  Karolina M. Zielinska-Dabkowska.  To light or not to light: Exterior illumination of tall buildings and bridges and its negative impact on the life of birds and fish. , 2013 .

[37]  Marcus Foth,et al.  The next urban paradigm: Cohabitation in the smart city , 2017, it Inf. Technol..

[38]  Jason W. Moore.  The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis , 2017 .

[39]  Adrian Franklin,et al.  The more-than-human city , 2017 .

[40]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability: Two Conference Workshops , 2009, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[41]  Szu-Yu Liu,et al.  To Decompose Is to Create: Supporting Creativity by Incorporating Nature in Design , 2017, Creativity & Cognition.

[42]  Pablo Gil,et al.  Biophilic Evolutionary Buildings that Restore the Experience of Animality in the City , 2015, Living Machines.

[43]  Luke Hespanhol,et al.  More than Smart, Beyond Resilient: Networking Communities for Antifragile Cities , 2017, C&T.

[44]  Liza Lim,et al.  How forests think , 2016 .

[45]  Christopher A. Le Dantec.  Design through collective action / collective action through design , 2017, Interactions.

[46]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do , 2002, UBIQ.

[47]  Laura Devendorf,et al.  Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships , 2018, CHI.

[48]  Irina Shklovski,et al.  Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age , 2017, C&T.

[49]  Richard Medland,et al.  A Customisable Dashboard Display for Environmental Performance Visualisations , 2013, PERSUASIVE.

[50]  Walter Cardoso Satyro,et al.  Planned obsolescence or planned resource depletion? A sustainable approach , 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production.

[51]  SueEllen Campbell.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World , 1998 .

[52]  D. Haraway.  Staying with the Trouble , 2020 .

[53]  Dzmitry Aliakseyeu,et al.  Rethinking our interactions with light , 2016, Interactions.

[54]  David Abram,et al.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World , 1996 .

[55]  Christopher Frauenberger,et al.  Special Topic: Taking Action in a Changing World , 2017, Interactions.

[56]  Janis Birkeland,et al.  Design for sustainability : a sourcebook of integrated, eco-logical solutions , 2002 .

[57]  Diana MacCallum,et al.  Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory , 2018 .

[58]  Laura Forlano,et al.  Posthumanism and Design , 2017 .