Clicking through climate change: how to develop interfaces for engagement and complexity

What happens when digital interfaces force us to slow down, when they are built to explore rather than to retrieve? In this talk, I will talk about working in a multi-disciplinary team to take on the challenge of developing new approaches to interfaces.

When working with data as researchers, we tend to treat interfaces as functional elements that simply provide access to our object of study and to examine it via computational means. But interfaces are not transparent.  They are important space of action that shapes what we do, as well as how and what we know with data.

Since interfaces have the potential to shape relations between humans, machines and more-than-humans, they could also help sustain new civic epistemologies, beyond control and calculation. I will share explorations in the area of climate research and ecology, and share what it would mean to develop interfaces that feel like encounters, rather than search boxes. These are step on the way to the dream of interfaces that can sustain ambiguity, complexity, exploration and multiplicity, as values that are crucial for knowledge in the Anthropocene.

Programme