The Toronto Water Atlas: Staging Encounters With Nature Through Design

Paper Title

The Toronto Water Atlas: Staging Encounters With Nature Through Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Design approaches for sustaining ontological multiplicity in environmental contexts.
• Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, environmental data, ontological multiplicity, scene-setting, participatory design, mapping, water, sustainable HCI, relational design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Prevailing environmental data infrastructures prioritize singular, technical representations of nature, marginalizing relational, historical, and affective ways of understanding and interacting with environmental phenomena.
• Significance: Addressing these biases is crucial for creating sustainable and inclusive environmental responses, especially in regions like Toronto where intensifying climate impacts disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI and STS has critiqued the reductionist tendencies of environmental sensing technologies and highlighted the relational and situated nature of environmental data. However, there is a gap in design approaches that actively sustain ontological multiplicity and enable diverse enactments of nature.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The Toronto Water Atlas (TWA), a participatory design project that stages conditions for multiple enactments of water through workshops, coworking sessions, and collaborative mapping activities.
• Novelty:
  1. Demonstrates scene-setting as a design approach to sustain ontological multiplicity.
  2. Explores how material, social, and technical arrangements shape environmental phenomena.
  3. Introduces fluid mapping techniques that challenge categorical boundaries around water.
  4. Balances project-orientedness and community-building through iterative design practices.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted monthly workshops and biweekly coworking sessions over seven months.
  • Rotated venues to enable place-based engagement with water.
  • Incorporated diverse activities such as moodboarding, walking tours, and mapping prototypes.
  • Used GitHub for collaborative documentation and asynchronous discussions.
  • Employed reflexive thematic analysis to interpret participant contributions and feedback.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants formulated water as animate, relational, and dynamic, moving beyond technical representations.
  • Fluid mapping approaches enabled diverse temporal, ecological, and spatial formulations of water.
  • Scene-setting practices disrupted infrastructural biases and supported ongoing experimentation.
• Advantage over baselines: The TWA resisted closure and singular representations, enabling continuous reconfiguration and negotiation of environmental data and technologies.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Engaged 10–15 core participants with diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
  • Used iterative feedback loops to refine event structures and collaborative practices.
  • Evaluated through thematic analysis of audio recordings, field notes, and participant-generated materials.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The project is ongoing, with planned public exhibits and further participant-led contributions.
  • Future work could explore scaling scene-setting practices to larger or more diverse communities.

Summary

The Toronto Water Atlas demonstrates how scene-setting can sustain ontological multiplicity by enabling diverse enactments of water through participatory design. By foregrounding material, social, and technical arrangements, the project disrupted infrastructural biases and supported fluid, relational mappings of water. Participants engaged deeply with water as animate and dynamic, fostering both technical innovation and community connection. This approach offers valuable insights for sustainable HCI and environmental design, emphasizing the importance of keeping environmental technologies open for continuous experimentation and reconfiguration.