Wanting To Live Here: Design After Anthropocentric Functionalism

Document Title

Wanting To Live Here: Design After Anthropocentric Functionalism

Document Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Sustainable Design
• Keywords: HCI theory, design theory, climate, sustainability, ethics of care, locality, dwelling, transformation, agriculture, design critique, essay

Research Background and Issues

• Issues and Challenges: The author points out that industrialized modes of production, distribution, and consumption exacerbate the climate crisis. Within the HCI field, there is a tendency to serve economic growth, lacking critical reflection on current environmental and social crises.
• Significance: The climate crisis demands systemic transformation, requiring not only innovative approaches but also a reorientation of design in terms of values and practices.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Inspired by ethics of care, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, the author seeks to explore how these ideas can be translated into design practices, with a particular focus on experimental ecological practices in agriculture as case studies.

Solutions

• Core Methods and Solutions:

  • Through fieldwork in an agricultural community in Taiwan, the author analyzes agricultural practices embedded with ethics of care, posthumanism, and ecological thought. These practices serve as material for reimagining HCI theory and practice.
  • Proposes the design concept of "moving beyond anthropocentric functionalism," emphasizing the collaborative relationships between land, non-human organisms, and humans to rethink the values and methods of design.

• Innovative Contributions:

  • Uses agriculture as an analogy and research subject to develop an HCI research framework centered on locality, relationships, and coexistence.
  • Shifts design from efficiency-driven functionalism to value-driven ethics of care, advocating mutual aid and symbiosis within ecosystems.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Conducts fieldwork, including interviews and observations, to study multiple experimental projects in a Taiwanese agricultural community, extracting specific practices and corresponding theoretical implications.
  • Employs the "explication de texte" method for in-depth analysis of textual data.
  • Explores digital and IoT tools in agriculture, such as sensor-based field monitoring systems and automated equipment, using open-source technologies.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  1. Proposes three core recommendations: designing for shared local resources, developing technologies aligned with biological systems, and prototyping land-based care collectives.
  2. Case studies include:
     • "Abandoned Farming Method": exploring non-monocultural agricultural models by "letting the land operate itself";
     • "Garden Forest": viewing the coexistence of weeds and crops as part of ecological restoration;
     • An ecological network for rice farmers designed with local culture and community support.

• Advantages and Value:

  • Compared to modern agricultural design centered on economic efficiency, these cases highlight ecosystem resilience, harmony with nature, and diverse pathways for agricultural sustainability.
  • Provides HCI with a new perspective distinct from traditional industrial logic, emphasizing locality, ecosystems, and interspecies coexistence in design practices.

• Experimental and Evaluation Results:

  • Experiments show that some practices aimed at avoiding chemical use still face uncontrollable events (e.g., pest control failures). However, their social, cultural, and ecological insights outweigh the agricultural output itself.
  • By incorporating both failures and successes into analysis, the study underscores the potential for design transformation triggered by locality.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: Lacks scalable methods that can be directly applied to other contexts. Its highly localized nature restricts universal applicability.
  • Future Directions: Further exploration of how these experiments can inform cross-cultural and cross-geographical design principles, and how to better balance design theory and practice.

Missing Information

• If the text does not provide detailed quantitative analysis of experimental data or specific technical implementations, it is omitted.