Description
Human and more-than-human experiences with digital biodiversity data are deeply intertwined with taste, poetics, cultural relations, meaning-making, physical encounters, loss, and other aesthetic dimensions. However, rapidly evolving digital biodiversity data platforms prioritize technoscientific advancements, futuristic visual design, and quantitative output over integrating other crucial aesthetic experiences of environmental change. Grounded in Science and Technology Studies, this presentation shares findings from a four-year Design Research project that explored creative data practices with an ecological community in the Netherlands and held workshops with sustainability officers working with biodiversity data at large US corporations. Together, these efforts articulated new design recommendations that could attend to ecological relations and broader aesthetic dimensions in biodiversity data representations. We found that, to align with user experiences and encourage ecological relations with environmental data, biodiversity platforms can create more resonant digital interactions by engaging the full aesthetic spectrum embedded in biodiversity data.
