Toxic Speculations: A Crip Posthuman Fabulation of Living in a Permanently Polluted World

Paper Title

Toxic Speculations: A Crip Posthuman Fabulation of Living in a Permanently Polluted World

Publication Info

• Topic area: Speculative design exploring environmental toxicity through disability and posthuman perspectives.
• Keywords: speculative fabulation, environmental illness, more-than-human design, environmental toxicity, disability studies, material speculation, HCI, wearable design, environmental precarity, Anthropocene.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Environmental toxicity is pervasive, diffuse, and often imperceptible, with its impacts disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Existing design approaches in HCI often fail to address the lived, embodied experiences of environmental harm or the political and historical dimensions of environmental precarity.
• Significance: Understanding and designing for the embodied and affective dimensions of environmental toxicity can foster new ways of living with and navigating polluted environments, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI has explored environmental sensing, speculative design, and more-than-human relations, but often overlooks disability perspectives and the uneven spatial and social consequences of environmental harm. This paper builds on disability studies, environmental illness narratives, and speculative fabulation to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Ray-Flats, a speculative design project involving shoes that glow in proximity to toxic sites, paired with a navigational guide that narrates a fictional world grounded in environmental illness experiences.
• Novelty:
  1. A speculative fabulation materialized through tangible artifacts that invite design practices to engage with environmental precarity.
  2. Introduction of the concept of "felt space" to make diffuse and ongoing environmental problems affectively perceptible through embodied interaction design.
  3. Critical reflections on combining material speculation with speculative fabulation to foreground marginalized perspectives in design.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Designed Ray-Flats using GPS modules, EPA land pollution data, and LED lights to visualize proximity to toxic sites.
  • Developed a navigational guide as a zine to narrate the speculative world of the Sensitives, a community navigating a polluted world.
  • Conducted iterative design and testing through autoethnographic walks, journaling, and thematic analysis to expand the speculative narrative.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Ray-Flats made environmental toxicity perceptible through subtle, dynamic LED lighting, evoking feelings of exposure, caution, and curiosity.
  • The design fostered a shift in attention from internal anxieties to external environmental awareness, highlighting the complexity of toxic landscapes.
  • The navigational guide provided a narrative framework for understanding and engaging with the speculative world of the Sensitives.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Unlike traditional environmental sensing systems, Ray-Flats emphasizes embodied, affective engagement with environmental toxicity rather than objective measurement or data visualization.
  • The project integrates disability perspectives, offering unique insights into navigating environmental precarity.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted 5 walks over 4 weeks using Ray-Flats, with field notes, photos, and journal entries documenting experiences.
  • Iterative design process refined the shoe’s glow dynamics and narrative elements of the navigational guide.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The project is situated in a specific urban context (Atlanta, GA) and reflects the authors’ positionalities, limiting its generalizability.
  • Future work could explore broader collaborations with marginalized communities and extend the design to other environmental contexts.

Summary

This paper presents Ray-Flats, a speculative design project that uses glowing shoes and a navigational guide to explore alternative ways of living with environmental toxicity. Drawing from disability and posthuman perspectives, the project introduces the concept of "felt space" to make diffuse environmental problems perceptible through embodied interaction. Through iterative design and autoethnographic exploration, the work highlights the potential of speculative fabulation and material speculation to foreground marginalized perspectives and foster new modes of engaging with environmental precarity. The findings invite HCI designers to embrace lingering, noticing, and storytelling as strategies for designing within the complexities of the Anthropocene.