The Eco-Technical Interface: Attuning to the Instrumental
Maya Livio, Laura Devendorf
Abstract
Given the ongoing environmental crisis and recent calls within HCI to engage with its cascading effects on the more-than-human world, this paper introduces the concept of the eco-technical interface as a critical zone at which designers can surface and subvert issues of multispecies relations such as nonhuman instrumentalization. The eco-technical interface represents the sites at which human, nonhuman, and technological interfaces overlap, ranging from remote sensing for conservation to smart devices for precision agriculture to community science platforms for species identification. Here, we highlight the pervasiveness of the eco-technical interface as a set of sites for further HCI inquiry, engage with the politics and instrumentalizing tendencies at three particular sites, and demonstrate tactics for cultivating attunement to, reflexively accounting for, and subverting instrumentalization in multispecies encounter.