Giving Voice to Nature

This project aims to digitally enable interaction between humans and nature, especially the marine environment and with particular case study on the Shannon River of Ireland, towards better and more sustainable restoration practices. The project seeks to find out what feedback we can get from the Shannon and its ecosystem about our efforts on sustainability, including our design interventions against the loss of biodiversity and climate change.

It seeks ways we can augment/amplify such signals into humanly understandable and actionable interfaces, and how humans can respond. Specifically, it explores the roles new and emerging interactive technologies, e.g., sensor technologies, embedded systems, mobile/physical computing, augmented/mixed reality and data visualization/sonification, could play in understanding the health conditions, needs and ‘feelings’ of aquatic natural entities, e.g., fishes, plants, water, and how to improve those conditions or fulfill the entities’ needs.

Involving both human and non-human users in technology and design, the project is multidisciplinary, integrating aspects from computer science, social science (e.g. psychology), natural sciences (e.g. biology/ecology) and product design.

The project aims to contribute to actualizing UL’s Resilient Bioregion goal of revitalising River Shannon by 2030.

Duration: 2023- 2026

Main contact: e: chidi.usanga@ul.ie

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Cristiano Storni