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Wasting seas
Published in Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan, Karma Eddison-Cogan, The Temporalities of Waste, 2020
Thus far we have considered how temporality consists of shifting sets of relationships of proximity. Elsewhere, I give a somewhat different twist to this term, which normally merely refers to closeness. Following on from Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey, I argued: [I]t is clear that neither space nor time per se constitute the major site of anxiety for us; rather, it is the changing nature of relations of proximity that has become the central site of concern and intensity. The question of “how close?” or “how far?” animates thinking about a range of issues: from personal issues and identifications, geo-politics and economics, the changing nature of the imbrication of the “private” and the “public,” the “global-in-the-local.”(Probyn 2001, 174)In this way, relations of proximities are both temporal and geographical. For instance, CO2 from the past surges forward and upward from deep cold waters and dissolves seashells in the present. This is just one aspect of the cleavages of time and temporality. While geologic deep time tells us that such cleavages are not uncommon in the history of the planet—for instance, Hutton’s findings demonstrate that rock formations may be composed of rocks separated by 65 million years—what is remarkable is how temporal and geographical proximities are being rearranged and speeded up in our anthropocentric moment.
Global Climate Change
Published in John C. Ayers, Sustainability, 2017
Unfortunately, the high-resolution ice core records do not cover a time with carbon dioxide concentrations and surface temperatures as high as we are experiencing today. Further increases in carbon dioxide levels and temperature will bring us increasingly outside the range of well-understood climate conditions. Although we don’t have as good estimates of global temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations prior to the oldest ice core records, which extend back roughly 800,000 years, we do know that Earth’s history included long periods with carbon dioxide levels and temperatures similar to and even higher than we have today. Scientists must use the rock record to learn more about “deep time” climate episodes such as this so they can reduce uncertainty about what will happen as global warming intensifies today.
HCI and deep time: toward deep time design thinking
Published in Human–Computer Interaction, 2022
Jörgen Rahm-Skågeby, Lina Rahm
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.