Preview: Mournful Design for Critical Climate Futures
A preview to our book, Mournful Design for Critical Climate Futures, which explores the potentiality of technology, design & grief for producing more just climate futures.
Preface
We are in the midst of a climate crisis. There’s no other way to put it. Such a crisis interlaces past and present ecological actions, orienting the human species and the planet towards our shared climate future. What does such a future look like? On our current trajectory: more wildfires, more floods, more refugees, more inequality, more plagues, more conflict, more catastrophe, each cascading and building on one another as we accelerate towards ruin. This isn’t reason to despair, to give in to nihilism, but an imperative to do things differently. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Who are we?
Before we can begin we must first introduce ourselves to you, dear reader, by telling you what brings us here today and clearly articulate where we sit in the messy societal web of power, privilege, and domination. Both of us are students at Princeton, a highly privileged institution experiencing enough comfort and safety to spend the last year working on this project. As individuals:
Raya: I am an interdisciplinary designer and artist. I have spent three years in the tech industry as a product designer in the higher-ed and healthcare industries at both a big tech company and a start-up that I co-founded and led for two years. I grew up in the metro-Atlanta area in a family with an unconventional parent structure where I was raised by two strong, independent, single, black mothers. I am a queer-identifying, able-bodied, multiracial, cis-gendered, American black woman. As someone with a multiracial background and little access to understanding where my ancestry comes from due to the histories of robbery and erasure that are colonialism and racism, I have come to identify most strongly as human — as a living inhabitant of a beautiful planet. I come to this work out of deep compassion and concern for the earth and the many peoples and creatures I share this home with. I also hold deep anger and grief for the ways my communities, past and present, have experienced extreme violence at the hands of oppressors and colonizers. I am writing this book because, after three years of studying Human-Computer Interaction and designing in the industry, I am sick and tired of business as usual. We need to address the loss. We need to get angry! And we need to critically consider what the role of design may (or may not) be in helping humanity through this existential crisis.
Kyle: I see myself as always bouncing around a tangled web of roles and disciplines — most commonly landing somewhere between designer, creative, academic, and engineer. I have worked in loose roles around tech and design at startups and nonprofits, most prominently founding and leading a nonprofit startup in the civic tech space for the past three years. I am a white settler raised in a wealthy American suburb as part of a nuclear family. My interest in this kind of work, and in all kinds of socially engaged projects, stems from an understanding that the alienation I feel, not just as a queer subject of heteropatriarchy, but as someone near the top of the socioeconomic ladder raised in supposed capitalist utopia. This experience has alienated me from a reciprocal relationship with the earth and from the joy that comes from a queer and diverse community. I say this not to victimize myself but to acknowledge that I come to this work with privilege and that unpacking and challenging the origins of that privilege has led me to my values of honoring and uplifting marginalized voices, values which I attempt to bring to this project. In doing the uncomfortable but necessary work of redistributing power, I have come to design and HCI out of a desire to expand the ways that our current and future world can be configured, guided by the principle that co-liberation is the only just path forward. Buoyed by the joy I feel in community with others committed to this project — be it at a party or a park or a kitchen or a studio — I find myself repeatedly returning to the notion that this alienation, this forced fatal future, all of it is not inevitable. And I’ll do anything I can to make that so.
We bring ourselves and our context directly into the work to say this: we are not interested, we are implicated. As designers and researchers at an elite, private, Western university, we understand we sit in a position of influence and privilege that has often been filled by those who believe they have the solutions and then ship them out to the rest of the world. Designers in particular have a history of reenacting domination in their designation of ideal outcomes, enacting differential power dynamics even when trying to do good. As students privileged to spend time at such an institution surrounded by the findings, failures, and queries of other scholars, we have a responsibility to understand that while we imagine forward, communities are hurting today. This work takes a critical and constructive approach to technology and environmentalism. While we hope to hold space for optimism and the creative work of future building, we primarily aim to emphasize the extreme anger, hurt, and grief that this type of reckoning with technology can surface. Some of the technologies we cite, critique, and research as a part of this work are not just unethical; some are dangerous and harmful –– some are lethal. In this work, we will –– and encourage you as the reader –– to grapple with the harm that has been done and continues to be done unto us, our communities, and the communities that are not represented in our authorship or our audience.
Who are you?
So that’s who we are, but what about you? In writing and building for this work, it is crucial to acknowledge our position as individuals embedded in systems that we cannot extricate ourselves from. These include but are not limited to colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism which we will discuss in Sources of Systemic Disaster (ch. 1). As such, we acknowledge the limitations inherent in attempting to configure a universal audience, since you too are embedded in these systems. Instead of falsely claiming universalism, we will write on what we know, to those whom we know — Western elite designers and technologists. This is not to gatekeep the knowledge we put together, but to explicitly state the positionalities that guide our writing, and those that are not covered in this project, though there are many ways in which this work may provoke thought or engender reflection in those outside this particular audience.
As such, we write on systems such as capitalism, colonialism, and industrialization from a distinctly American point of view. We also use multiple variations of the word “we” throughout the piece — referring to we the authors; we in a position to design or create; and we the human and more-than-human collective inhabiting this planet. Therefore we recognize that we are not the primary victims of climate-related disasters, and are part of a system that perpetuates and causes the changes we decry. Indeed, even the institution we depend on for our livelihoods is a central actor in enacting domination. (1) In our position of privilege, we acknowledge that we cannot and will not have firsthand accounts of climate disaster, and so our project does not attempt to speak to this point of view. Instead, we consider the ways that we are entangled in these forces, and have the agency to collectively create alternative futures.
We write to this audience because we know it and are part of it, with the hope that the changes we propose are seen as neither universal to all people nor exclusive to the realm of the Western elite. Instead, we seek for our principles of ecofeminist and grief-centered design to provoke and inform the ways in which designers create climate futures in a wide variety of contexts.
What did we do?
Our process of synthesizing knowledge to define and create principles of mournful design for critical climate futures was by no means smooth sailing. We have pivoted, pirouetted, and played our way through ideas in sustainable HCI, environmental humanities, critical race theory, feminist technoscience, anthropology, sociology, climate science, media studies, and much more in creating our argument. In keeping with this spirit, we treat this work as an opening of an intellectual space that is bound to generate new and alternative perspectives as we sit with it. As we discuss in Methods of Story & Play (ch. 7), we are motivated to resist endings, and as such resist the idea of this work as a tightly bound finished product. May its ideas breathe and take on a life of their own in the minds of anyone who reads it.
The core of our process and resultant work has revolved around an ongoing interrogation of sustainable HCI, which we focus on in Orienting Sustainable HCI (ch. 3) but which motivates the entirety of the work and its multidisciplinary tendrils. As research methods, we conducted pluri- genre literature reviews, field research, and research through design. Our field research involved a trip to New Orleans in order to provide for and learn from communities at the fore of the climate crisis; however, in reflection on the pitfalls of our approach, we choose not to discuss this process until Reflections & Projections (ch. 9).
For our research through design, we built two design interventions, in order to enact and evaluate our principles of mournful design.
We created the Grief Garden (www.grief.garden) where participants can read and add memorials to hold space for climate grief. In this project, our goal was to forge communal relations by centering grief in discussions of climate impacts. It is an exploratory website comprised of colored cells and Unicode characters made to resemble a landscape. Visitors to the site can scroll to navigate and click on symbols to reveal embedded memorials. These memorials are either a quote and link to read more, as in the case of memorials we initially populated the site with, or a description of a memorial another visitor has added. If they click on an open cell, participants can add their own memorial by responding to prompts asking them to describe and name their mourning and choosing a color for their memorial. As such, the website functions as a participatory digital climate graveyard, engaging its audience with stories both curated and crowdsourced to reveal the many ways climate grief is both felt and processed.
We also created the Seed Sovereignty Store (www.seedsovereignty.store), a creative subversion of e-commerce platform languages designed to encourage critical engagement with and action on issues of seed and food sovereignty. This website utilizes trendy commercial aesthetics to read as an e-commerce platform and contains over two hundred generative art images of seeds categorized into ‘new arrivals’, ‘pre-order’, and ‘missing’ seeds. While the site can be navigated as a typical e-commerce platform with visitors filtering and navigating to pages for each seed, the subversion occurs when it is revealed on each seed’s store page that the seeds are not actually for sale. On this page, text encourages reflection and engagement with concepts of seed sovereignty; seeds are either accompanied by text of and links to poems and stories around seeds and seed politics (new arrivals), speculative imaginings of seeds genetically modified in response to climate events (pre-order), or stories of corporate control limiting the ability for seeds to be owned or controlled by farmers and Indigenous communities (missing).
Both projects are discussed in-depth in our evaluation in Evaluating Mournful Design (ch. 9), but we weave our design decisions throughout the following pages out of a desire to illuminate potential strategies for mournful design. Throughout the work but particularly in Evaluating Mournful Design (ch. 9) and Reflections & Projections (ch. 10), we discuss the pitfalls that we experienced and learned from while conducting this work. In particular, we reflect on how the field research trip to New Orleans and the Seed Sovereignty Store at times fell short of our goals. We learn from our mistakes to illuminate more on how practicing mournful design is both difficult and necessary.
The pages ahead
In the pages ahead, we embark on a journey of weaving together threads from a variety of disciplines and approaches to build out our concept of mournful design. We split this journey into three parts: setting the scene, defining mournful design, and doing mournful design. We follow this with a conclusion and reflections on our process, with lessons for methods of mournful design. Our eight principles of mournful design are as follows:
Learn from precarity.
Stay with the trouble in making worlds.
Encourage anti-colonial struggle.
Embrace care.
Apply grief to make climate crisis feel real.
Apply grief to get to the root causes of the climate crisis.
Use grief’s communal power to unite.
Use grief’s haunting power to instill climate consciousness.
The climate crisis we address acts not as an encapsulated thing, but as a shifting force at the confluence of a variety of forces, some of which we will name and discuss here. Thus, we begin section one and Systems of Systemic Disaster (ch. 1) with a discussion of how systemic climate disaster finds its source in the logic and forces of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism. We introduce the Anthropocene and its spawn — the many neologisms academics use to discuss our geologic moment — to bring up the challenge of scale when addressing climate crises. Politics of Design (ch. 2) follows this by setting the scene for design. Here we discuss how design is related to systemic problems including but not limited to climate change, and question the status quo by pointing toward literature on the angles of critical design, reflective design, adversarial design, ludic design, participatory design, and design justice. We also critique the colonialist imaginary that illuminates design thinking and other traditional forms of doing design, which aligns with the critique of traditional forms of doing HCI in Orienting Sustainable HCI (ch. 3). In this chapter we connect critique of the subfield of sustainable HCI — its tendency towards the individual and persuasive — with a call for subversion and the creation of alternative methods, thus setting the scene for our introduction of mournful design.
In section two, we define mournful design, rooted in eight principles of speculative interventions. In Speculation & Imagined Climate Futures (ch. 4), we discuss speculation and how it helps us to counter the fantasies of domination that underlie technosolutionist fantasies, accompanied by an analysis of potential lessons from speculative projects ranging from the technical to the fantastical. This grounds our eight principles, four of which structure Ecofeminism (ch. 5). This chapter cites feminist technoscience scholars to show how we might free the utopian imagination by learning from precarity (Anna Tsing) (2), staying with the trouble in making worlds (Donna Haraway) (3), encouraging anti-colonial struggle (Max Liboiron) (4), and embracing care (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa) (5). Section two closes with the final four principles of mournful design, inspired by the potential power of grief. Grief for Climate Futures (ch. 6) focuses on grief (rather than fear or guilt) and its ability to help us name loss that makes climate change feel real, get to the systemic root causes of this loss, create community through collective mourning, and haunt — or stick with us — and instill climate consciousness.
After introducing this form of design, we take up this new approach to sustainable HCI in section three and apply it to analysis of storytelling, play, and our own research through design. In Methods of Story & Play (ch. 7), we call for stranger and more varied climate fiction, a resistance of endings, stories that haunt, and integration of play. We engage with play, in particular, as a method for exploratory engagement of critical climate futures, in resistance to ‘playful’ fantasies of domination. We close this section with Evaluating Mournful Design (ch. 8): an evaluation of our own two design interventions, a meandering discussion on our personal reflections, our process, our findings, and lessons for doing mournful design.
In sum, our work presents eight concrete principles for new forms of speculation and design, and orients existing speculations towards these principles to reveal the opportunities and questions left unexplored when designing critical climate futures. We close our final section with a series of reflections on our experiences in the work — our research process, the process of collaboration, implications for research and design, limitations of our approach, and potential future work.
What this is not
As mentioned, we are designers and students of critical HCI writing to our peers in the fields of computing, design, and their discontents. In grappling with the climate crisis, we consider this work as one that opens up potential connections between ideas, disciplines, and ways of doing HCI, rather than claiming a universal or expert point of view. This particularly holds for our evaluation of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism — and our lack of evaluation on racism, imperialism or other - isms. Frankly, a deeper dive into these subjects is not something we are equipped to do, but we are equipped to elevate the voices in these conversations which HCI needs to become a part of in order to practice mournful design for just climate futures. We touch on, rather than dive deeply into, many of the disciplines and ideas we reference. As such, there are multiple aspects of this project which we do not cover, but which are part of the conversation in the spaces we step into. In particular, we make note that this work does not embark on a full survey and interrogation of studies on grief, memorials, and practices of mourning. It also does not take a justice-centered approach to design and climate which would necessitate a deeper engagement with critical race theory, Black feminism, and histories of crisis and resistance. Further, it retains a Western and American view, and does not address or dive into theories of postcolonialism or Indigenous studies. All of these approaches would serve the project of addressing design and climate change well, and would undoubtedly open up new and generative ways of approaching the problems that have led us to the midst of ongoing climate catastrophe. What we have done in this work is pulled together threads of conversations in disciplines both near and far from HCI, all towards the project of weaving a new textile composed of ideas, methods, and practices that lead us, together, to a better world.
Diaz and Li, “What the New Center for Gender and Sexuality Erases”; Howard, “Princeton in the Service of Fossil Fuels”; Li and Farah, “PART I | ‘Resurfacing History’”; Li et al., “The BJL Sit-in Five Years Later”; Reynolds, “Why Divest Princeton Filed a Legal Complaint against the University.”
Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.
Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care.
If you are interested in reading more of Mournful Design and purchasing the book or ebook, please check out our website here.