HCI and deep time: toward deep time design thinking

To see objects not just through the lens of human agency but through the lives of nonhuman beings that both shape and are shaped by relationships and processes embodied in material forms is to invite stories – in fossilized bones, decaying tissue and living flesh. (Mitman et al., 2018, p. xi) Several scholars within the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) have identified time and materiality as fundamental analytical facets of relevance to both the use and design of computer technologies (Berzowska et al., 2019; Odom et al., 2018). However, with some exceptions, there has been a (very reasonable) tendency to focus on relatively short-term interactions, delimited to situations of use or specific devices (although acknowledging, for example, issues of sustainability and temporal relationships and negotiations that take place across individuals, groups, and institutions). As a contrasting example of particularly long-term interactions, humanistic research fields, such as media archeology, critical posthumanism, and the environmental humanities, have recently directed attention to the notion of deep time as a long-term perspective providing new analytical and ethical traction on both temporalities and materialities of media technologies (Fredengren, 2016; Mattern, 2015; Parikka, 2017; Taffel, 2016). Put simply, deep time refers to temporalities that include the fundamentally perdurable geological processes of the Earth – effectively considering the pace, rhythm, causalities, and materialities by which durable ecological changes occur. While such a perspective may at first seem difficult to grasp and remote to HCI and design, we take stock in environmental anthropologist Richard D.G. Irvine’s argument that “deep time is not an abstract concept, but part of the phenomenal world impacting on people at the level of experience” (Irvine, 2014, p. 157). Paraphrasing Irvine, we thus suggest that one challenge for HCI and design is to find new ways of exploring the interactions between humans, technologies and geological temporalities. As far as the authors of this paper can tell, the notion of deep time has not been specifically theorized in the realm of HCI and design. While this in itself does not mean that there are no academic overlaps already, it also calls for an exploration of theoretical and practical intersections and synergies between deep time and related areas within HCI. As such, the main contribution of this paper is an initial outline of how HCI can take aspects of, what we may call ‘deep time design thinking’, into consideration. Having said that the suggestions and implications in this paper come from approaching deep time and related areas in HCI analytically. Our theoretical analysis of overlapping concepts and the proposed implications are not meant to be read as decisive evidence, but rather as analytical and practical tools that highlight how materiality (and thereby design) can be understood, and reflected upon, in terms of ‘deep’ temporalities. We consequently regard this paper as a first attempt at analyzing and articulating the potential of deep time design thinking in HCI.