Design for the Right to the Smart City in More-than-Human Worlds

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper aims to add to the growing body of critical and civic led smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmental humanities about more than human worlds, as a way to shift understandings within HCI of smart cities away from the exceptional and human centered, towards a more inclusive understanding that incorporates and designs for other others and other species. We illustrate through a case study that involved codesigning Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities, possibilities for creating more environmentally and socially just smart cities

Touching Impermanence: Experiential Embodied Engagements with Materiality in Contemporary Art Practice

Touching impermanence describes the experiential moment in an art encounter when one senses the enchanted reality of one’s interconnections within the sentient matterflow of existence. All matter in existence is constantly vibrating, changing, assembling and evolving into forms and organisms, cycling through decay and disintegration, then reforming again with diversity and difference; this is the impermanence of sentient matter-flow. Humans are just one form of these reciprocal assemblages; we are within and part of sentient matter-flow. We also co-create with sentient matter-flow, changing these cycles on micro and macro levels, just as they change us. On a macro level human actions have impacted and changed the Earth’s biosphere, altering and polluting sentient matter-flows to the extent that our present time period is becoming known as the Anthropocene, the human age of destruction and disconnection. There are many efforts to readdress our anthropocentric feelings of apathetic disconnection from the Earth; one is found in the arts and correlates with my practice-led research. This doctoral study of sensate experiences of materiality and haptic thinking, which provide both maker and audience with direct palpable experience of time, forms a specific understanding of touching impermanence. My art processes involve working with tactile materials such as beeswax; tree branches, stumps and bark; paper; ash; rocks; ice; snow; charcoal; light and fungi. Engaging with these materials cocreatively involves a methodology of touch, multisensorily following materialities’ sentient matter-flow. Acting with the material, I am present to the material’s own sense of time, interactions, agency, histories, layers of interbeing and interconnections with surrounding matter. This requires being open to the mysteriousness of materials, inviting moments of enchantment within art encounters and the realisation of touching impermanence. This thesis investigates my studio practice and works produced, alongside related practices of Australian and international artists, by drawing on the intersections between New Materialism discourses and Buddhist philosophy to address aspects of phenomenology and eco-philosophy in the complexities of these art practices and artwork encounters

Transforming Biodiversity Governance

This book outlines a governance approach that prioritizes ecocentric, compassionate and sustainable development, and stresses the importance of addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss. It is ideal for academics, policy makers and practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core