Laura Perovich

with Catherine Titcomb, Casper Harteveld, Brian Helmuth, Tad Hirsch, and the TinySea team

Oceans play an important role in environmental issues such as climate change and are also critical to human well-being. This research surfaces and explores opportunities for HCI to contribute to marine systems research as part of a broader effort in sustainable HCI.

Our team's paper provides an overview of marine systems research in sustainable HCI to date:

Perovich, L. J., C. Titcomb, T. Hirsch, B. Helmuth, C. Harteveld. Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities, and Marine Systems. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 525, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581291.

In this work, we identify several themes that could benefit from further HCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies. We also discuss possible opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration with marine scientists and coastal communities.

Our team is also exploring design interventions and community-based research opportunities around marine systems. Our TinySea online game teaches middle school students about food webs, specialist and generalist species, and the possible impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. It also discusses aquaculture, an emerging approach to gathering food from the ocean that is controversial in some communities; future work could engage diverse groups with these games to explore their varied values and needs and provide space for discussion.

Our team's work also includes early conversations with coastal communities and stakeholders in the northeast. Future work with these communities may explore how novel economic systems could support more just approaches to green technologies and climate change adaptation on a local level.