Marcus Foth’s research while affiliated with Queensland University of Technology and other places

The 20th anniversary of The Journal of Community Informatics signifies a milestone in the evolution of community informatics (CI) as a field dedicated to empowering communities through the strategic use of information and communication technology (ICT). This article offers some personal reflections on the origins and evolution of CI, tracing its roots to seminal works by scholars such as Michael Gurstein. It also tells the story of how urban informatics was inspired by CI as a distinct field of scholarship to study the interplay between people, place, and technology in urban environments. Building on this foundation, the present challenges and opportunities facing CI are explored, including issues of digital inclusion, ethical implications of emerging technologies, and the transformative potential of ICTs for social change. Looking ahead, the article envisions desirable futures for CI grounded in a life-centred approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of humans and non-humans within larger ecological systems. Embracing a more-than-human paradigm, CI is uniquely positioned to advocate for ecological justice, amplify the voices of marginalised human and non-human communities, and foster collaboration between humans and the environment to create and protect resilient and sustainable habitat for life on this planet. Through these efforts, CI can contribute to a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all living beings, averting the planetary ecocide that threatens our shared existence.

In their quest to access China’s lucrative consumer market, Western businesses are often entranced by the sheer scale of the country’s social media landscape. However, reducing Chinese consumers to mere statistics veiled in orientalism underestimates the continued importance of understanding their local cultural context. As part of an extensive Australia-China supply chain research program, the current study used community engagement and human-centered digital narrative approaches to co-design communication and marketing strategies between Australian beef producer communities and Chinese consumers. Using field work notes, interviews and content examples we discuss the co-design intervention that focussed on short video content sharing on Douyin. Qualitative insights highlights a divergence between the visual language used by Australian producers to engage with Chinese consumers and the dynamic, vibrant visual discourse among local Australian prosumers of beef. We argue this is why the Australian export industry’s promotions often fail to resonate with Chinese consumers. Our study also suggests how best to bridge these cultural gaps through a combination of communication strategies and design intermediaries, recognizing the crucial role that short video platforms play.

Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicles, smart parking, and smart street lighting, such initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. Critics, however, increasingly argue that technologically driven, and efficiency-led approaches to sustainability in the smart city are too simplistic and leave little room for participation and citizen agency despite government efforts to integrate innovative technologies in more equitable ways. This has prompted a growing awareness that a human-centred notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only, is no longer tenable. Within the age of the Anthropocene, increasing numbers of scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the entanglements between human and non-human others (including plants, animals, insects, as well as soil, water, and sensors and their data) in urban life. In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, renowned researchers and practitioners from urban planning, architecture, environmental humanities, geography, design, arts, and computing critically explore smart cities beyond a human-centred approach. They respond to the complex interrelations between human and non-human others in urban space. Through theory, policy, and practice (past and present), as well as thinking speculatively about how smart cities may evolve in the future, the book makes a timely contribution to lively, contemporary scientific and political debates on what it means to design genuinely sustainable smart cities.

At a time when wildfires and severe floods are challenging human society in unprecedented ways, we examine how immersive virtual environments can be used to enhance community preparedness for, and engagement with, disaster scenarios. Drawing on research from the fields of interaction design and participatory design, we explore the capacity of three-dimensional (3D) immersive virtual environments to foster increased situational awareness and risk perception among diverse communities—from first responders to local populations. Investigating tangible interfaces and interaction schemas applied to spatialised settings, we demonstrate how immersive environments can support effective scenario testing and rehearsal of responses to hazardous situations. Application of the described methods can equip users with response strategies that may prove productive in augmenting risk perception and deliberation.

Settlers of colour occupy a liminal space in the settler colony of Australia, and this liminality was exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through the literature on digital activism, technological immersion, and placemaking, this paper explores Radical Placemaking as a route for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people based in Brisbane to stake their right to the city through alternative digitised modalities. Three projects using situated digital stories were created: (i) the Chatty Bench Project; (ii) the TransHuman Saunter Project; and (iii) Chatty Bench Festival Community Media Visual Projections. We analysed the experiences of study participants creating the digital stories and eventual user experiences of the stories for their ability to provoke self‐reflection, immersiveness, and belonging through evocation and representation of lived experiences. The paper suggests that radical placemaking offers CALD communities subversive tactics of occupying space through emerging technologies without engaging in erasure of existing histories of place.