COMPASS ’25, Toronto, ON, Canada

This study details how digital biodiversity data is used and gains meaning in local restoration projects, how these experiences contrast with large-scale innovation patterns, and what new design recommendations emerge from these insights. Digital innovations in biodiversity technologies are increasingly complex, fast-paced, and driven by technological capacities where data generation rather than biodiversity restoration risks becoming the primary goal. Focusing on a biodiversity restoration project with a living lab community in the Netherlands, this participatory research critically examines how plans for emerging technologies, such as biodiversity simulations and digital twins, contrast with local user relations to biodiversity data. Building on qualitative insights from six-months of fieldwork, a digital and physical data portal was designed to simulate ongoing technoscientific innovation and make their complex effects experientially available to users. Findings are brought directly in conversation with emerging technical features through four distinct themes with the aim to share user-insights and produce design recommendations for: environmental storytelling, prediction and future making, interactive dynamics, and simulation aesthetics. These themes articulate the community's preferences towards digital environments that support their nuanced, complex relationships with local biodiversity, suggesting a shift from top-down technocentric approaches to more community-driven and restoration-focused models. Based on this study, design recommendations are articulated for each of these four themes contributing detailed empirical and practice-oriented insights that propose how new biodiversity technologies can resonate more effectively with local biodiversity restoration efforts. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10606-025-09524-2.

Despite a long tradition of ‘non-expert’ participation in ecoacoustics research, asymmetrical distribution of resources and engagement between the Global North and Global South continue, extending to ecoacoustic sensing and design. Whilst there exists a growing body of work in Participatory Design (PD) addressing the technical and social challenges of ecoacoustic research, we find that popular PD methods inadequately address design justice and decolonising agendas. Through participatory ecoacoustic sensing and design engagements with a forest community in Ghana, we highlight the tensions that emerge when employing visual and written modes of PD in a context where an oral approach to creativity and communication is more appropriate. We present Justice-oriented Design Listening, an acoustically-mediated approach to PD, described through three modes: polyphony, pace and transformation. This work contributes to calls for design justice by developing a methodological approach that facilitates pluralistic participation in design when developing conservation technologies in non-Western contexts.