Social Media for Social Good

Recent sustainable HCI research has advocated "working with nature" as a potentially efficacious alternative to human efforts to control it: yet it is less clear how to do so. We contribute to the theoretical aspect of this research by presenting an ethnographic study on alternative farming practices, in which the farm is not so much a system but an assemblage characterized by multiple systems or rationalities always evolving and changing. In them, relationships among species alternate between mutually beneficial in one moment (or season), and harmful in the next. If HCI is to participate in and to support working with nature, we believe that it will have to situate itself within such assemblages and temporalities. In this work, we look into nontraditional users (e.g., nonhumans) and emerging forms of uses (e.g., interactions between human and other species) to help open a design space for technological interventions. We offer three ethnographic accounts in which farmers-and ourselves as researchers-learn to notice, respond, and engage in symbiotic encounters with companion species and the living soil itself. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Sustainability; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in interaction design.

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Rural HCI Research

Hardÿ

Wyche

Veinot

2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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HCI researchers are increasingly conducting research in rural communities. This paper interrogates how rurality has been treated in previous HCI research conducted in developed and high-income countries. We draw from research outside of HCI to suggest how we can effectively engage with rurality in research. We present results of a scoping review of HCI literature that asks: 1) How do HCI researchers define rurality?; 2) How do the unique characteristics of rural communities enter into study findings?; 3) What methods are used in rural research?; and 4) Where has rural research been conducted? More than twice as many rural HCI articles have been conducted in low-income and/or developing countries than in high-income and/or developed countries. HCI researchers rarely define rurality, and when they do, they primarily define it using descriptive rather than sociocultural or symbolic definitions. Rural research findings have primarily addressed infrastructure and distance/geographic isolation as unique rural characteristics, while qualitative, observational, and cross-sectional methods dominate this research. There are further opportunities for HCI research to more productively advance understanding of what rurality is, and how it matters for sociotechnical systems.

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Social Media for Social Good

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

“We would be dead in the water without our social media!”: Women using entrepreneurial bricolage to mitigate drought impacts in rural Australia

“We would be dead in the water without our social media!”: Women using entrepreneurial bricolage to mitigate drought impacts in rural Australia

Symbiotic Encounters

Rural HCI Research

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