Recent work in Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) argues that improving our relationship with nature demands designing for nature as plural and multiple. This means moving beyond approaches that impose one version of what nature is, toward sustaining its different enactments and relationships. This paper examines how such ontological multiplicity can be sustained through design. Drawing on Mol’s ontological multiplicity and Stengers’ scene-setting, we present the Toronto Water Atlas, a seven-month design project involving artists, scientists, and community members. Through workshops and coworking sessions, we experimented with various design choices that surfaced and sustained multiple enactments of water, in direct contrast with singular formulations of water prevalent in informatics used for policy and planning. Through this work, we draw attention to the infrastructural biases that restrict ontological multiplicity, and demonstrate how design can more deliberately sustain diverse water ontologies by staging conditions for partial, and relational enactments.

This article introduces climate data practices as a conceptual lens for HCI research and design toward social and environmental justice. We offer a working definition of this approach, which we locate at the intersection of critical data studies and practice theory. Drawing from a collaborative and multi-sited study of activists, city staff, and non-profit organizations, we present six examples of climate data practices as a means of illustrating the approach as well as the diversity of issues that it may usefully surface. Through these examples, we demonstrate that a data practices approach foregrounds the local, relational, and plural qualities of climate data. Finally, we connect data practices to two related concepts—scenes and infrastructures—which together offer a framework to guide critical interrogation of the social and political life of data, and support the design of data practices that serve broader goals of social and environmental justice.

In the design of contemporary mapping technologies, effective navigation has become synonymous with the quickest route, limiting the extent to which people engage with the places they move in and around. This paper unsettles the prevalent focus on efficiency and explores opportunities to support placemaking during everyday practices of navigation. Drawing on 16 interviews and using the Value Sensitive Design framework, we identify seven alternative values, beyond efficiency, that hold significance for people navigating the city. Through a series of two design workshops, we further examine how and when these values come to matter during navigation. Our findings suggest four ways in which the prevalent design standards of navigational apps work against these values, and highlight their potential contribution to placemaking during technology mediated navigation. In doing so, this paper contributes to placemaking research and ongoing questions of efficiency and optimization within HCI.

In response to climate change and continued urbanization, urban transportation systems around the world are undergoing transitions to promote lower-emission vehicles, public transit, biking and walking. However, mobility is a complex issue that raises important questions of social justice as a result of its connections to numerous aspects of everyday life and the broader social and political contexts. Drawing on interviews with transportation advocates across Canada, we identify four ways in which the design and use of existing mobility tools and technologies perpetuate mobility injustices, and deepen the divide between urban planners and the public. Looking across these arguments, we note path-dependence in transportation knowledge infrastructures as a common barrier to mobility justice advocacy that can be difficult to recognize or overcome. Finally, we consider tactics that research in HCI and CSCW might pursue as part of efforts to unsettle path-dependence and reorient transportation planning towards mobility justice.

The social life and long-term trajectories of online peer production communities are shaped and animated in part by value tensions that arise when distributed, heterogeneous participants are brought together into collaboration. This study of OpenStreetMap (OSM) draws upon values-based approaches to investigate how peer production communities enact their values and navigate tensions between them. We examine how conflicts within the community over the rise of corporate participation in OSM provided a stage for the articulation and enactment of community values, shedding light on the broader dynamics and trajectory of the platform and its participants. The contributions of this work include reflections on how increasing corporate participation in OSM intersects with discourses about the emancipatory potential of emerging mapping technologies, insights into the challenges of scaling membership in peer production communities, and exploring the role of values in understanding the social life and governance of online communities.