Many children are disconnected from nature and have limited understanding of where their food comes from. Noticing nature, through active sensory engagement, is fundamental for children to learn to appreciate and care for it. Yet little is known about the noticing acts of children (3-5 years) in their everyday nature experiences in HCI research. We investigated children’s nature engagement in childcare centre settings, with a focus on food gardens and a view to understanding how digital technology might support it. Informed by literature on noticing, we conducted three design activities using prompt cards, an IoT-based camera and a Bee-Bot to analyse children’s noticing in food gardens, including: focal noticing of the more-than-human, relational noticing for connection, and temporal noticing through ecological tempos. We synthesise and highlight technology design opportunities that use slow noticing to bridge hidden to noticed, connect part to pattern, and attune from tempo to flow over time.

This paper presents Connected Prayerwheels, a pair of augmented cultural objects using gesture sensors, ambient lights, and a song sharing feature designed to enhance everyday cultural connectedness for Bhutanese families over distance. We conducted interviews and design discussions with participants across Bhutan and Australia to understand families’ everyday routines, practices, and interests. We found many of their everyday routines were rooted in Buddhist cultural and religious traditions, which they were keen to share over distance. We therefore designed a prototype, the Connected Prayerwheel, and demonstrated it to participants to explore whether it would be fitting to use a cultural device in a connected form. Our findings highlight how cultural connectedness can be enriched through connected cultural artifacts. Families enjoyed sharing prayers, Bhutanese songs and hymns (Choeyangs), and the meaning of cultural symbols. This study contributes the design and discussion of connected cultural artifacts to studies of family connection over distance.

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research prioritises children's participation in the design process to inform design outcomes, while less attention is paid to framing design problems. Our study explores how children aged 4-5 years can better understand complex environmental problems through our storying-roleplay approach, a co-design method aimed at shifting children's thinking from absolutist views toward thinking about relationships, interdependence and win-win solutions. The method involves eliciting children's stories, creating characters, designing probes and engaging in roleplay to collaboratively reframe complex problem space. This research contributes to current discussions on children and environmental sustainability in CCI by: (i) introducing storying-roleplay as a method to co-design with young children to develop skills for better understanding complex problems, (ii) fostering children's participation in the earlier stages of design process and (iii) highlighting the potentials for co-designing relational technologies with young children.

This paper investigates connecting people in remote communities through nature in order to foster stewardship and conservation of endangered species. Global citizen science technologies have found success in urban, developed countries, but they typically rely on large distributed populations to gather or analyze data and do not suit sparsely populated and remote contexts. We undertook a long-term field study to iteratively co-design a tangible and playful nature engagement prototype in a remote World Heritage Area community. The prototype design fosters learning through ambient sounds as well as exploration and discovery of species through nature soundscape recordings. We found that the prototypes amplified locals' interest, became embedded in community relations and gradually led to placemaking of new engagement 'spaces' and of newer forms. We contribute lessons learned on how design can foster nature engagement and stewardship of endangered species by heeding Suchman's call for design to "enter networks of relations that make technology possible". We contribute design implications and new design foci HCI/Citizen science engagement for species conservation.

Ecoacoustics draws together computer scientists and ecologists to achieve an understanding of ecosystems and wildlife using acoustic recordings of the environment. Computer scientists are challenged to manage increasingly large datasets while developing analytic and visualisation tools. Ecologists struggle to find and use tools that answer highly heterogeneous research questions. These two fields are naturally drawn together at the tool interface, however, less attention has been paid to how their practices influence tool design and use. We interviewed and collected email correspondence from four computer scientists and eight ecologists to learn how their practices indicate opportunities for reconciling difference through design. We found that different temporal rhythms, relationships to data, and data-driven questions demand tool configuration, data integration, and standardisation. This research outlines interfacing opportunities for new ecological research utilising large acoustic datasets, and also contributes to evolving HCI approaches in areas making use of big data and human-in-the-loop processes.

The increasing loss of species globally calls for effective monitoring tools and strategies to inform conservation action. The dominant approach to citizens engagement has been smart phone and platform-centric, tasking crowds to collect and analyze data. However, many critically endangered species inhabit remote areas, characterized by sparsely populated communities with poor internet connectivity. Approaches need to garner high engagement relative to population size, with data collection and knowledge synthesis suited to the local context. We conducted a field study in remote communities to understand how to enhance conservation of Bhutan's critically endangered White-bellied heron by exploring existing monitoring practices and trialing acoustic sensing technologies. We found that knowledge about the species is partial, heterogeneous, situated within and across communities and rooted in cultural beliefs. Sensors, acoustic interfaces, and playful probes provided new ways for the community to 'see' and discuss their local environment fostering them to share and grow their knowledge together. We contribute a synthesis of key considerations for designing effective participatory sensing to conserve species in remote communities.

We introduce the Ambient Birdhouse, a novel IoT design for the home that seeks to encourage awareness and discovery of birds outside. People increasingly have routines and technologies that disconnect them from nature. Moreover birds are hard to come to know, seen but not heard, heard but not seen, or simply around when we are not. The Ambient Birdhouse aims to reconcile these positions, by using local bird media to leverage people's playfulness and curiosity, calmly sustain interest over time and ultimately to garner interest and engagement in nature and conservation projects. We trialled the Ambient Birdhouse with five families. Key findings are that the playful nature of the Birdhouse has an immediate grasp on children, and through them on the rest of the family. Children were prompt to learn bird calls, and invented and played games that involved the Birdhouse. Learning strategies emerged spontaneously from family routines and arrangements, with each family creating different moments and spaces for learning.

Passive acoustic recording has great potential for monitoring soniferous endangered and cryptic species. However, this approach requires analysis of long duration environmental acoustic recordings that span months or years. There is a variety of approaches to analysing acoustic data. However, it is unclear which approaches are best suited for monitoring of endangered species in the wild. Specifically, this study is undertaking acoustic monitoring of the critically endangered White-bellied Heron (Ardea insignis) in Bhutan. Four different acoustic analysis methods are investigated in terms of their detection accuracy, involvement of human experts, and overall utility to ecologists for target species monitoring work. Our experimental results show that human pattern detection using a visualization technique has detection performance on par with a cluster-based recogniser, while a machine learning classifier implemented using the same acoustic features suffers from very low precision. Further, specific cases of false positives and false negatives by the different methods are investigated and discussed in terms of their overall utility for ecological monitoring. Based on our experimental results, we demonstrate how an integrated semi-automated approach of human visual pattern analysis with a recogniser is a robust system for acoustic monitoring of target species.