Giving Voice to Nature: Digitally Enabled Human-Nature Interaction to Support Restoration Practices in the Shannon River

Abstract

This project seeks to enable interaction, communication and understandability between humans and the natural environment by means of digital technologies, for collaboration with nature focusing on the aquatic ecosystem, with case study on the Shannon River of Ireland. While water, fishes and plants don’t talk and we can’t easily get their feedback on our sustainability efforts, there are indicators in nature that show how healthy or unhealthy these entities are. But those indicators are mostly available to, or detectable by, scientists who interpret and communicate them only scientifically, making them largely inaccessible to the ordinary citizens. Using the new More-than-Human and Research through Design approaches, this project seeks to make those indicators more accessible to the layperson and to, in the long run, bring about large-scale, citizen-driven, technology-mediated but nature-led actions towards environmental sustainability.