Engaging with Nature through Technology: A Scoping Review of HCI Research

The effect of technology and modernity on human-nature relations is a topic of long-standing significance in philosophy, the humanities and the arts, with renewed and pressing importance in the era of ecological crisis. Notions of human separation from nature, as a consequence of tool-making, inventions and science, can be traced back to early writers such as Gilgamesh [11] and to ancient Western philosophers such as Plato [1:63]. In recent decades, such thinking has been taken up by philosophers [122], historians [179] and ecologists [171]. Recurrent themes are that human artefacts, constructions and systems have enabled us to subjugate nature, and ultimately removed us from the natural world altogether. For some, the separation from nature is seen to have commenced with the first development of tools [16] while others argue that it began with the emergence of writing [1], farming [148] or the Medieval antecedents to industrialisation [179]. During the Age of Enlightenment in Western societies, prevailing Cartesian notions of an essential split between the realms of mind and the material body positioned humans as separate from, and superior to, nature and other animals. Such concepts provided a foundation for modern scientific thinking and the rise of technology and industry. Indeed, Adorno & Horkheimer described the Enlightenment as being founded upon the drive to master nature [67], and the expansion of Western scientific modes of thinking and associated technologies as a program of “disenchantment of nature” [163].

Running in parallel with this long discourse on disconnection from nature, there has been a counter flow of ideas and design initiatives aimed at reconnecting modern societies with natural environments. These include the widespread creation of National Parks and urban parkland, including zoological and botanical gardens, as spaces for public recreation, healthy exercise and education [12], and the concurrent evolution of nature tourism [130]. Art and cultural media have long endeavoured to bring wild nature to civilized populations. A common theme in Romantic art is the portrayal of unpredictable nature [42], and Victorian literary authors such as Thomas Hardy explored interconnections between ancient, natural landscapes and rural life in an era of mechanisation and upheaval [121]. Many town planning and architectural movements in the 20^th century, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture, have aimed at harmonious integration of the built environment with natural surrounds [38], and in recent decades have evolved to incorporate biophilic elements [81] and ecological sensibilities [173]. Contemporary nature documentaries present anthropogenic threats to the planet [73], while essayists have drawn attention to the rough edgelands [149] at town fringes, highlighting the shifting boundaries between natural and urban places [47].

The recent expansion of digital technologies is seen by many as continuing and exacerbating the disenchantment of nature described by Adorno and others, now re-expressed through notions such as the “extinction of experience” [155]. Within such narratives, screen-based technologies and digital entertainment are liable to reduce time spent outdoors by young people in particular [27]. Such concerns intersect with popular efforts to reduce or reject use of networked technologies, from “digital detoxes” to off-grid lifestyles [125,146,166].

A growing array of digital initiatives inherit from this lineage of efforts to provide people with opportunities to re-connect with and experience nature. There is a now an expanding body of HCI research on this topic, encompassing a wide range of technologies developed and applied with various objectives, including human wellbeing, education and ecological awareness, scientific research and conservation.

Having identified key ideas from broad histories of technology's influence on human engagement with nature, we turn now to how human-nature engagements have been conceptualised and studied. The ways in which people seek to engage with nature are shaped by prevailing sociocultural understandings and orientations. The rise of science during the Enlightenment placed a new emphasis on observing and explaining natural phenomena. This led to various innovations in Western countries, such as the 19^th-century tradition of naturalism as an amateur pursuit and as a component of school education. In this tradition, direct experience of nature is regarded as a virtuous pastime and critical to children's learning [49,104]. In recent decades this thinking has intersected with environmentalism, and growing acknowledgement and evidence that contact with nature, and feeling part of nature, are essential to forming the attitudes and behaviours required to address our ecological crisis [20]. Other research has explored the association of nature experiences with place attachment [88], and with environmental identity [129], giving rise to new measurement scales including the New Ecological Paradigm [43], the Connectedness to Nature scale [102], and measures of biospheric values [56,101].

The value of spending time in nature for personal and collective wellbeing has been studied and theorised in multiple ways. Attention Restoration Theory proposes that entering an environment which does not require directed attention (such as natural settings) allows for restoration of performance and perhaps subjective wellbeing [77]. An alternative framework, Ulrich's psycho-evolutionary Theory of Stress Reduction [172], outlines the way in which pleasing natural environments act upon nervous systems to increase wellbeing, and reduce anxiety or stress. Both of these theories draw on the biophilia hypothesis, the notion that people are inherently drawn to connections with the natural world [82]. Therapeutic interventions that involve visiting nature, such as wilderness therapy [140], are now receiving substantial scholarly attention, with forest bathing found to be effective in reducing stress indictors, as compared to relaxation in urban environments [117].

In a similar vein, environmental and social scientists have drawn attention to the negative effects of our diminishing experiences of nature, through notions such as the extinction of experience [155], and Louv's broader formulation of Nature Deficit Disorder [97], both related to the disconnection of modern urban societies from the natural world. This body of work also suggests that attitudes to nature are shaped not only by direct contact but also by “vicarious” experiences, such as reading books, watching televisual media, or discussing nature with friends or family [156]. This quality of the directness or indirectness of nature experience foreshadows an important dimension in the survey of HCI studies that we present in this paper.

The understanding of nature as a place that people can visit, directly or indirectly, is underpinned by the deep-rooted concept of an ontological divide between humans and nature, which is being challenged by recent transdisciplinary perspectives. The notion of natureculture, introduced by Donna Haraway, and broader notions of ongoing interspecies entanglements [62,89,132] have been taken up by scholars in multiple disciplines. The concept of human-nature inseparability is increasingly influential in HCI scholarship which seeks alternatives to exploitative and capitalist orientations in technology design, through paradigms such as socio-ecological relations [25] and “being attentive” [92] to the more-than-human world. Engagement with nature, from this perspective, requires the development of new practices that involve “staying with”, “making with” and “arts of noticing”, in ways which attend to more-than-human worlds and dissolve boundaries between nature and culture [63,132,170].

We seek to understand how these diverse perspectives figure in HCI research, and how they give rise to different orientations to technology for nature engagement, as part of charting the overall trajectory of this body of work.

In undertaking this scoping review we sought to understand how HCI has approached the issue of engagement with nature. Given that nature is a contested term and engagement with nature is a broad notion with multiple interpretations, we made early efforts to define these terms and thereby set the boundaries of our literature search. We began by adopting a dictionary definition of nature, which was refined during the initial search. This definition corresponds to common usage of the term as used to denote the natural world:

We initially defined nature engagement to involve:

During the literature search we iteratively refined this definition of nature engagement. We responded to the diverse interactions with nature addressed in the HCI research we were reviewing, to clarify our focus on experiences of the natural world and the understandings and attitudes that are bound up with that. Through the search and the first round of the review, we delineated the definition of nature engagement to include:

Accordingly, this scoping review does not include all work related to technologies used in natural environments, but rather only those which explicitly address nature engagement, as defined above. For example, we include publications on the ideation of hiking equipment to improve the experience of enjoying and photographing nature [4]; the design of digital interventions to support children's interactions with nature in outdoor play [32]; and the intersection of technologies with notions of “mastery over nature” in mountaineering [23]. However, we exclude research on technology for use outdoors that does not give explicit attention to nature engagement, such as an analysis of hikers’ digital communities and preparations [86]; a field study examining how digital playground installations intersect with children's games and their social context [8]; and design of collaboration tools for use by wilderness search and rescue teams [72].

The HCI literature encompasses varied conceptualisations of nature which required our initial definition to be further elaborated. Firstly, “the landscape” includes not only “wild” and semi-wild places such as forests and mountains, but also urban nature, such as parks and gardens. We identify these latter places as part of nature as they offer valuable opportunities for engaging with the natural world, even if they can be understood as “human creations”. Nature engagement also takes place in homes and other indoor settings, for example through interactions with plants and recordings of local wildlife, and we have included HCI research that supports this. Secondly, the expanding body of work on animal-computer interaction (ACI) requires us to consider more closely which animal interactions might comprise nature engagement. In keeping with common understandings of nature, we exclude domesticated animals such as pets and farm animals, but include wildlife. Consequently, ACI research that studies companion animals [66] and agriculture [50] is excluded from this survey. In the same vein, we excluded work in which plants are used as input / output or as part of an interactive system and where there was no attention to engagement with plants or the natural world [145]. We also excluded work in which the products and systems of nature are conceptualised purely as resources to sustain human life and societies, such as energy use [53], food production [64], recycling [90] and air pollution [152]. Thus, we excluded from our survey some work in Sustainable HCI which has been previously surveyed [40,61]. As these definitions were established, we revisited previously reviewed papers to check whether they should be included.

Adopting the definitions of nature and nature engagement above, this scoping review addresses the following research questions:

We conducted three rounds of searching and selection of articles during the period March – August 2022. As our aim was to focus on HCI research, we started with an initial search of the ACM Digital Library, which provided a manageable point of entry for the review. We searched all full-text publications of the ACM Digital Library that included the terms “nature” and “environmental” in the Title or Keyword fields. From the results of this first search we identified venues with publications on this topic that corresponded to our interest in HCI: CHI, CSCW, DIS, IDC, Ubicomp, Proc. ACM (HCI), ToCHI, OzCHI, and ACI. We scanned keywords and titles to identify additional search terms to include in our second round of article identification: “bird”, “wildlife”, “animal”, “forest”, “biodiversity”.

Next, we searched for the additional search terms in Title and Keyword fields of the nine venues named above. We tested several other keywords, including “ecology”, “ecological”, “outdoor”, “tree”, “wild” and “wilderness” but found that these were not fruitful in identifying work with a focus on nature engagement. For terms such as “ecology” and “wild” this was largely due to frequent metaphorical usage in the ACM Digital Library corpus. We examined outputs of the NatureCHI workshop series, held at CHI 2016 and MobileHCI 2017 [58–60], to identify relevant works and authors.

Lastly, we examined the reference lists of articles identified in previous searches, and the lists of citing articles (discovered via Google Scholar), to identify additional relevant articles. In keeping with common approaches to scoping reviews, we iteratively developed and refined the criteria for inclusion and exclusion, based on our unfolding mapping of the literature and identification of candidate search terms and sources during the search [119]. We screened all items for relevance based on title and abstract, and during full-text review we checked each item against the following inclusion criteria:

Our four-member research team reviewed the selected papers, using the “descriptive-analytical” approach referred to by Arksey et al. [6] as “charting the data”. As part of defining what information should be recorded about each publication, and to ensure consistency in extracting information [6], we created two templates . Each paper was assigned to one of the authors, who used the template to extract key information. While some papers were relatively straightforward to review and chart, others involved discussion and two or more readings (by different team members) in order to satisfactorily capture the research and theoretical perspectives.

The first author developed the initial version of the template, which was piloted by all other members of the team and amended based on group discussion. This was repeated three more times, adjusting the questions and categories specified in the template to capture the types of research, technology and nature engagement encountered in the literature. Through this process, we created two templates, one for empirical studies and a second for other types of work, such as position papers and surveys. We revisited papers reviewed using early versions of the template so that the final versions of the templates were applied universally. Using these templates, we captured summary data relating to the research questions, along with specific descriptive information about the articles. For example, we recorded the country where the researchers were based, the type of methods used and the aim of the work, the technology proposed and the anticipated users (See Supplementary Files for an example of template and a completed template). We compiled the data into an Excel spreadsheet, used as a “data charting form” [6] for analysis and summary. Throughout this iterative process the research team met regularly to discuss the scope of the review, definitions and categories.

The first and second authors summarised the extracted data to gain an overview of the studies in terms of the types of technologies proposed, the types of studies, the geographical distribution, and the publication venues. To address our first research question, we examined theoretical perspectives on nature engagement outlined in the position papers and surveys. This was supplemented by an analysis of the perspectives (where stated) underpinning the empirical studies. To address our second research question, we examined the ways in which technologies have been proposed to support different modes of engagement and analysed the papers in terms of the ways that they use technology. From that we identified six categories of roles for technology, described in Section 5. In examining the technologies, we summarised from our charted data:

This section describes the overarching theoretical perspectives on nature engagement that frame HCI research on this topic, and charts the emergence of new perspectives reflected in position papers and critical surveys.

We examined the methodologies used in the 103 papers. We found that the most commonly adopted methods were design research (53 papers) and qualitative studies (55 papers). These approaches were often combined (in 41 papers) to create a technology prototype and conduct a small-scale field trial using observations or interviews with the intended user group. Papers that included only qualitative research were typically studies of existing practices and how these might inform technology for nature engagement, or were standalone evaluations of commercial systems or technologies that had been developed elsewhere.

By comparison, only 13 studies involved quantitative research. 6 involved an artwork or were informed by artistic practice, such as Kobayashi's exhibition of the Fukushima Audio Census artwork, which aimed to engage people with the natural environment surrounding the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster [85]. Other paper types in our survey included 15 position papers, 3 literature reviews, 6 methodological discussions and 5 workshop proposals.

Several papers investigated and proposed new methods for research and design for nature engagement. We identified two key challenges addressed by these works. The first challenge relates to capturing the embodied, experiential dimensions of direct contact with natural phenomena and outdoors activities, as input to design activities. Cumbo [33] found that chest-mounted GoPro video cameras can be used to effectively capture children's perspective on their nature-based play, in ways that reflect the social, situated and spatial-temporal dimensions of their experience. Bidwell and Browning explored a ‘point of view’ camera and collection of natural artefacts as ‘probes’ for capturing in situ experience of being in nature and associated meaning-making processes [13]. Altarriba [3] trialled a broader range of “from-the-wild” methods, including written notes, photos, voice memos, a visual diary and post-trip reflections, with the aim of conducting co-design during outdoor activities such as hiking and foraging, targeting future technologies to enrich nature experiences. An alternative approach proposed by Stahl et al. [159] entails the use of natural materials and processes as inspiration and grounding for design, by including them in physical sketches; an approach that can be used in natural settings or in a design lab.

The second important methodological challenge lies in addressing and including nature in design activities. Animal-computer interaction (ACI) researchers have proposed that interaction design techniques can be extended to include animals as stakeholders and as design partners [100] through incorporating scientific knowledge and expertise; and this approach is now being extended to ecosystems [167]. The influence of ACI is also discernible in work which investigates the inclusion of plants in designing for nature engagement [69,160], including the ethical dimensions of research involving “vegetal subjects” [48] and the extent to which plants benefit from different types of design responses [7,29]. More-than-human perspectives on interactions with nature are giving rise to methodological research into de-centring the human in design. Drawing on Tsing's “arts of noticing” method, Clarke and others investigated approaches such as speculative, participatory inclusion of non-humans in cities [26]. Responding to the concept of naturecultures [62], Liu turned to photography to notice and examine juxtapositions and entanglements between the natural and the cultural [95]. Biggs and colleagues [15] employed autoethnography to investigate noticing non-humans as a method for design which decentres the human, revealing the “hard psychological work” involved in reconfiguring the self as designer and researcher. Quitmeyer and Kelly argue for the value of designing and building nature engagement technologies in the settings where they will be used [133]. These methodological contributions highlight the difficulty of researching and designing with nature, and point to the potentially valuable role that HCI can play in constructing a positive role for technologies in human-nature relations, by promoting engagement with nature.

Through review and summary of the literature, we found that digital technologies are being deployed to support direct experiences of nature as well as various forms of indirect nature engagement. In analysing these different forms of engagement, we drew on the influential typology of Grudin [57] for classifying research in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), which identified place and time as two axes for a typology of technology options for supporting human-to-human interaction. According to the typology we offer, nature engagements can be understood to span two dimensions of variation: the distance from nature and the directness of experience (Table 1).

Distance, as an analogue to place in Grudin's typology, refers to the extent to which the user is removed from nature. We identify three levels of distance: in situ engagement, where the user is in physical or sensory contact with nature; ex situ: nearby engagement, where the user engages with nature that is close by, such as a backyard or local nature spot; and ex situ: distant engagement with nature which is remote from the user. We distinguish ex situ: nearby interventions from other types of ex situ engagements, as they address specific sites, animals, plants or phenomena that elicit a particular form of interest, and with which users might gain familiarity over time, and so offer interesting opportunities and properties.

The second dimension of variation is Directness of experience, which concerns how nature is perceived, whether directly - through being in, or in contact with nature - or indirectly, through different forms of mediation and abstraction. Directness subsumes the dimension of time, (per Grudin [57]), as well as other critical aspects of nature engagement. Direct engagement involves contact with physical nature, and occurs in situ. This corresponds to an established definition of direct contact with nature: “time outdoors interacting with nature (natural environments and associated biodiversity)” [156]. We identified in the literature three degrees of indirectness of nature engagement enabled by digital technologies, offering different possibilities in terms of temporal elements (including synchrony), verisimilitude, and abstraction. We use the term mediated engagement to denote viewing or consuming media such as photographs, video or audio recordings of nature while abstracted nature entails representations such as data visualisations or fact sheets, and simulated nature relates to computer-generated naturalistic environments, animals and plants, such as virtual immersive environments or 3D models.

In this section we describe a typology comprising six roles for digital technology that we identified in the HCI literature. For each type, we outline the types of technologies and deployments, users and domains, claims and evidence for outcomes and challenges and limitations identified.

Our scoping review confirms that studies of technology-supported nature engagement have been a part of HCI for at least 25 years. However, this research has taken place in somewhat isolated pockets that are not often acknowledged as belonging to a unified body of research. Work in this area has connections to Sustainable HCI in terms of its orientation towards ecological issues, and in the intention to shape knowledge, attitudes and behaviour regarding the natural environment and ecological crises. There are overlaps also with the field of ACI, sharing a consideration of interspecies interactions and the intention to sensitise HCI to the interests and needs of non-humans. Nonetheless, our scoping review reveals a body of work with discernible patterns and threads, and shared aims, approaches and challenges. We found these patterns to be sufficiently coherent to develop two typologies which support consideration of the ways that technologies might be designed to reverse the extinction of experience and which help to identify gaps and opportunities for future research.

The first typology we proposed concerns the directness of contact with nature that is supported by technology. Direct experience of nature is understood to be richer and more beneficial in terms of nature connectedness and personal wellbeing [51,97,169], but raises issues of access and equity. That is, some people may not be able to enjoy direct experiences of nature, for a range of reasons. HCI work draws attention to alternative and diverse forms of indirect nature engagement that can be offered equitably through mediated, abstracted or simulated nature, and how these vary with the user's distance from natural phenomena. Indirect experiences allow for extended and ongoing nature contact, and may be a way to regularly access nature for urban populations who lack the means or opportunity to travel outside the city. Many interventions achieve their value through combining direct and indirect forms of nature engagement. For example, indirect nature interventions can encourage people to spend time directly experiencing nature through participating in games or volunteer activities, or can allow for more depth in later direct encounters by building knowledge or familiarity with wildlife. Direct nature encounters can thereby be extended or deepened through mediated, abstracted or simulated nature experiences. Ideally, these different types of interaction might promote a virtuous cycle: an ongoing interplay between direct exploration and observation of physical surroundings, interspersed with learning, analysing and sharing through mediated or abstracted engagement. All of these patterns are evidenced in the HCI work reviewed here, and we intend this first typology to clearly capture them.

Our second typology identifies six roles for technology in nature engagement, which align loosely but not exclusively with three broad motivations in the literature reviewed. Firstly, participation in science and conservation is often the motivation for technologies which allow for learning and pooling knowledge about nature. The goals of contributing to human activity and wellbeing are most closely aligned with nature on demand and discovering and navigating nature sites. The goal of shaping human-nature relationships (for example, increasing nature connectedness or a`wareness) is a primary driver for interventions which allow experiencing nature from other perspectives, as well as other categories. These six categories involve different levels of interactivity, cognitive engagement, learning, and sociality.

The decision to focus our review on work in HCI was based on the belief that these HCI studies collectively offer distinctive perspectives and methodologies that are worthy of examination in themselves. However, it must be acknowledged that much relevant research on technology-supported human-nature engagement exists in other disciplines, such as psychology and environmental social sciences. We turn now to consider opportunities for HCI to expand its horizons and connect with a broader body of thinking and evidence. Many of the publications surveyed here demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary connections and provide valuable models to follow. Some demonstrate, for example, how relevant theory on human-nature relations can be enhanced through the recognition and re-imagining of natural elements — plants, animals and ecosystems — as stakeholders in interaction design, e.g. [15,167]. Other endeavours in Participatory Design and ACI aim to empower diverse human users and non-human animals in design activities [177].

Many of the HCI studies we reviewed focus their contribution on novel designs for natural situations, with a promise of positive impact. There is often little formal evaluation of their medium- or long-term effects, or even of the abilities of technology interventions to engage people sufficiently and for sufficiently long periods of time to achieve desired outcomes. This is an understandable limitation of work that faces the challenges of designing and deploying technologies in natural environments, needing to overcome barriers such as remoteness, access and inhospitability. However, there is a need to establish methods for evaluation to understand how design choices impact knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. This can be aided by connecting with expertise and theories developed in other disciplines, including measures of biospheric values, place attachment and environmental identity.

Equally, HCI has much to offer neighbouring disciplines working on human-nature engagement through technology. HCI can bring to bear its tradition of critiquing technology proposed as a simple fix to complex problems, and the authenticity of grounding design in human and other concerns. The value of HCI approaches will increase as an expanding range of technologies are deployed by non-technology researchers working in various settings. More broadly, HCI research on nature engagement is well placed to support global efforts to address the ecological crisis. While the crisis is deeply rooted in larger arenas of politics, human history and culture, it nevertheless hinges on human-nature-technology relations. In tandem with neighbouring disciplines, the work reviewed here offers the seeds of a contribution to address this larger challenge.