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Collapse Informatics and Practice: Theory, Method, and Design
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What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics—the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity. We sketch the design space of collapse informatics and a variety of example projects. We ask how notions of practice—theorized as collective activity in the “here and now”—can shift to the future since collapse has yet to occur.
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... This would also apply to other energy-constrained situations, such as disaster recovery or off-grid installations in developing countries. (e.g., Tomlinson et al. 2013, Lambert et al. 2015. The authors introduce the concept of "graceful decline." ...
... The authors introduce the concept of "graceful decline." Collapse informatics (a term introduced by Tomlinson et al. 2013) models what I believe is the only truly sustainable model of ICT. It necessitates making do with less electricity and therefore lower bandwidth and intermittent access. ...
... Constraints can thus be experienced by way of reacting to rising costs, such as those caused by systemic or external events affecting global markets, and to regulatory changes, in this case related to national and international health regulations. Additionally, Sustainable Interaction Design [13], collapse informatics [28] and computing within limits [29], suggest a path where information technology and air travel could also be restricted already in design practice, e.g. incorporating considerations for finite planetary resources and global heating. ...
... We want to add to their analysis another research field "Collapse informatics", whose goal is to understand how to design and develop sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity [47]. ...
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have increasingly been questioning computing’s engagement with unsustainable and unjust economic growth, pushing for identifying alternatives. Incorporating degrowth, post-development, and steady-state approaches, post-growth philosophy offers an alternative not rooted in growth but in improving quality of life. It recommends an equitable reduction in resource use through sensible distributive practices where fulfillment is based on values including solidarity, cooperation, care, social justice, and localized development. In this paper, we describe opportunities for HCI to take a post-growth orientation in research, design, and practice to reimagine the design of sociotechnical systems toward advancing sustainable, just, and humane futures. We aim for the critiques, concerns, and recommendations offered by post-growth to be integrated into transformative HCI practices for technology-mediated change.
Disruption to routines is an increasingly common part of everyday life. With the roots of some disruptions in the interconnectedness of the world and environmental and socio-political instability, there is good reason to believe that conditions that cause widespread disruption will persist. Individuals, communities, and systems are thus challenged to engage in resilience practices to deal with both acute and chronic disruption. Our interest is in chronic, everyday resilience, and the role of both technology and non-technical adaptation practices engaged by individuals and communities, with a specific focus on practices centered in nature. Foregrounding nature's role allows close examination of environmental adversity and nature as part of adaptivity. We add to the CSCW and HCI literature on resilience by examining long-distance hikers, for whom both the sources of adversity and the mitigating resilience processes cut across the social, the technical, and the environmental. In interviews with 12 long-distance hikers we find resilience practices that draw upon technology, writ large, and nature in novel assemblages, and leverage fluid configurations of the individual and the community. We place our findings in the context of a definition for resilience that emphasizes a systems view at multiple scales of social organization. We make three primary contributions: (1) we contribute an empirical account of resilience in a contextual setting that complements prior CSCW resilience studies, (2) we add nuance to existing models for resilience to reflect the role of technology as both a resilience tool and a source of adversity, and (3) we identify the need for new designs that integrate nature into systems as a way to foster collaborative resilience. This nuanced understanding of the role of technology in individual and community resilience in and with nature provides direction for technology design that may be useful for everyday disrupted life.
Products and technologies reflect injustices in the world such as racism, sexism, and ableism. And all too often, they exacerbate those injustices in overt and insidious ways. How can we understand and address the harms brought forth by design and technology? Where is the nexus of accountability and justice? This field review begins with provisional definitions of design and justice, followed by an overview of scholarship that surfaces how technologies both create and worsen injustices. In response, it offers two necessary conditions for advancing social justice in and through design. The first is making design processes more inclusive through democratic strategies such as participatory and codesign methods. The second, which the review identifies as a major gap in research and practice, is recognizing design as a mode of practical ethical inquiry in ways that enables designers to deal with the inherent ethical uncertainty of design situations. In conclusion, the review outlines educational and institutional barriers to ethical design and offer suggestions for future investigation.
This paper outlines how ideas of ‘degrowth’ might be used to reimagine sustainable forms of education technology. In essence, degrowth calls for a proactive renewal of technology use around goals of voluntary simplicity and slowing-down, community-based coproduction and sharing, alongside conscious minimalization of resource consumption. The paper considers how core degrowth principles of conviviality, commoning, autonomy and care have been used to develop various forms of ‘radically sustainable computing’. The paper then suggests four ways in which degrowth principles might frame future thinking around education technology in terms of: (i) curtailing current manipulative forms of education technology, (ii) bolstering existing convivial forms of education technology; (iii) stimulating the development of new convivial education technologies; and (iv) developing digital technologies to achieve the eventual de-schooling of society. It is concluded that mobilisation of these ideas might support a much-needed reorientation of digital technology in education along low-impact, equitable lines.
Although societal collapse has been part of human history for millennia, a growing fear is that social, economic, technological, and environmental systems have become so globally interconnected, and their resilience so under threat, that the next collapse could be global in scale. Drawing from the collapse and social-ecological resilience studies literatures, we conceptualize two stages of collapse-avoidance governance—the pre-trigger adaptive governance stage during which policies draw on systems resilience to avoid the initiation of the collapse spiral, and the post-trigger transformative governance stage during which policies are implemented to steer out of the collapse spiral through fundamental change of systems regimes. Even under continued good collapse-avoidance governance it is possible for a variety of reasons that adaptive governance policies fail to avoid triggering of the collapse spiral, in which case policies to facilitate transformation will likely need to be substantially different. When designing adaptive governance resilience policies, therefore, governance institutions should anticipate these contingencies by (1) supporting research and design of transformation policies to implement if the resilience policies ultimately fail and the collapse spiral is triggered, and (2) accepting that effective transformation policies may depart significantly from, and even conflict with, the resilience policies. Even if the pre-planned transformation policies ultimately are not implemented amid a collapse spiral, the pre-planning exercise can sharpen focus on the need for design and implementation of effective adaptation policies.
"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience." —Julian Dibbell, Wired "World of Warcraft is the best representative of a significant new technology, art form, and sector of society: the theme-oriented virtual world. Bonnie Nardi's pioneering transnational ethnography explores this game both sensitively and systematically using the methods of cultural anthropology and aesthetics with intensive personal experience as a guild member, media teacher, and magical quest Elf." —William Sims Bainbridge, author of The Warcraft Civilization and editor of Online Worlds “Nardi skillfully covers all of the hot button issues that come to mind when people think of video games like World of Warcraft such as game addiction, sexism, and violence. What gives this book its value are its unexpected gems of rare and beautifully detailed research on less sensationalized topics of interest such as the World of Warcraft player community in China, game modding, the increasingly blurred line between play and work, and the rich and fascinating lives of players and player cultures. Nardi brings World of Warcraft down to earth for non-players and ties it to social and cultural theory for scholars. . . . the best ethnography of a single virtual world produced so far.” —Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer. Bonnie A. Nardi is an anthropologist by training and a professor in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is the social implications of digital technologies. She is the author of A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing and the coauthor of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart and Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cover art by Jessica Damsky
Sustainability is now a buzzword both among professionals and scholars. However, though climate change and resource depletion are now widely recognized by business as major challenges, and while new practices like ‘green design’ have emerged, efforts towards change remain weak and fragmented. Exposing these limitations, Design Futuring systematically presents ideas and methods for Design as an expanded ethical and professional practice. Design Futuring argues that responding to ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now requires a new type of practice that recognizes design’s importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable. Illustrated throughout with international case material, Design Futuring presents the author’s ground-breaking ideas in a coherent framework, focusing specifically on the ways in which concerns for ethics and sustainability can change the practice of Design for the twenty-first century. Design Futuring - a pathfinding text for the new era - extends far beyond Design courses and professional practice, and will also be invaluable to students and practitioners of Architecture, the Creative Arts, Business and Management.
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.