Making-With the Burrowing Owl: Value Sensitive Design as Sympoietic Method in Environmental Communication

Abstract

How can we learn to live with vulnerable species like the Burrowing owl? This paper looks to Value Sensitive Design methods as a way to expand upon Post-Humanist Design and answer Donna Haraway’s call to learn to live on a damaged planet. Value Sensitive Design proves a compelling tool as it includes non-humans in its definition of stakeholders and it encourages designers to think relationally across the human and non-human divide and with the value tensions between humans and non-humans. This research project examines how Value Sensitive Design can be used in environmental communication to practice and embody relational thinking. This project engages Wakkary’s notion of designer as biography. This project also engages Freidman and Hendry’s methods of Stakeholder Analysis and Ethnographic enquiry into values and technology. In utilizing these concepts, this research project will seek to determine how Value Sensitive Design methods allow designers to make-with non-humans. This is demonstrated through a digitally produced zine about burrowing owl conservation efforts in Phoenix, Arizona. The digitally drawn, zine acts as an “object-to-think-with” and has been developed as part of an existing series of environmental education pamphlets by the Arizona State University Institute for Humanities Research.