Garden stories : supporting more-than-human interdependence through interaction design

Garden Stories research project investigates the use of participatory design practice and scholarship to structure community engagement and design to focus on more-than-human thriving through a series of collaborations with urban community gardeners in Vancouver, Canada. As the climate crisis continues to disrupt countless ecosystems, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars remind us that humanity is deeply dependent upon and intertwined with diverse life forms and ecological environments. This project embodies these teachings and positions interaction design as a more-than-human collaboration that has been happening since time immemorial. It values the potential for interaction design as a practice that can highlight human interdependence with other beings and the ecological environment. I collaborated with urban community gardeners, individuals who practice a type of interaction design that nurtures diverse more-than-human interdependencies and relations in garden spaces. By tending to humans, plants, insects, birds, soil, and many other actors throughout their practice (e.g., planting, watering, harvesting), urban community gardeners support community care and impact the livelihoods of humans and other-than-humans in their city. Through a series of speculative participatory design activities (Seed-Sharing Library Workshop, Insect Hotel Workshop, and Dear Garden Journal), and semi-structured interviews, I prompted community gardeners in Vancouver to share stories that reflect the myriad interactions and forms of relations they have and cultivate through their gardening activities. I investigated what these stories reveal about the situated conditions of the urban community garden spaces, and the possibilities long-standing participatory interaction design approaches offer to those striving to enhance humanity’s awareness of more-than-human interdependencies and relations. Learnings from this research suggest that the more-than-human relational stories that gardeners shared are generative for broadening human understandings of who contributes to, and creates, the worlds we live in. These stories also suggest that attending to and caring for diverse social and ecological relations can be generative for envisioning social, political, and economic aspects that lie beyond human-centred interactions. Finally, this project offers considerations, examples, and questions to encourage humility and curiosity about how people can explore the uncertainties of approaching and extending participatory interaction design in support of more-than-human interdependence through and beyond their work.