Heidi Biggs — Reframing Climate Data: Situating Data in Histories in Place

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues we face today as a society. The phenomenon has inspired new awareness of human entanglements with non-human others (like plants, animals, and ecologies) as well as disparate impacts that fall along familiar lines (laid via histories) of race, gender, class, and access. In this talk, I discuss my research agenda, which uses design and making alongside humanistic theory and sensitivities to lay out critical agendas for Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) and Interaction Design Research. Over the course of two design research projects, I discuss the entanglements of climate change, data, and embodied histories in place. By framing climate change impacts as tied to data practices, unevenly distributed, and historically situated, it shifts narratives to more local, actionable, and justice-oriented interventions. This work ultimately seeks to expand notions of criticality in sustainable HCI research.