Conference Grant Reports: Yangyang Yang at CHI 2025

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Yangyang Yang presented her paper, Being The Creek: Mobile Augmented Reality Experience as an Invitation for Exploring More-Than-Human Perspectives, at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. From Yangyang:

It is with great pleasure that I, together with my advisor Professor Kimiko Ryokai, presented our paper, Being The Creek: Mobile Augmented Reality Experience as an Invitation for Exploring More-Than-Human Perspectives, at the CHI 2025 Conference. Being The Creek is a mobile augmented reality (AR) experience that weaves together history, perspective, and locality, inviting participants to take the "first-person" perspective of Strawberry Creek, who flows through the heart of the UC Berkeley campus. Participants lay alongside the Creek at different locations, attuning themselves to her environment through embodied, multisensory engagement. Through the lens of AR, they encounter how the world might appear from the Creek’s perspective—tracing her journey from the pre-colonial reverence of Indigenous peoples, through the industrial era when she was misused as an open sewer, to a speculative future of collaborative survival despite capitalism. By playing the role of the Creek and shifting between human-centered and creek-centered perspectives, participants explore the Creek’s unique subjectivity and the dynamics of human-nonhuman power relations throughout history. This embodied perspective-taking prompts participants to notice the active participation of environmental nonhumans in shaping their local community, challenge the taken-for-granted anthropocentric stance, and rethink our shared futures where multispecies can collaboratively thrive.

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) is the premier international gathering for researchers and practitioners in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This year, the conference took place in Yokohama, Japan, from April 26 to May 1. The 2025 theme, IkiCHI, draws from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, meaning “a reason for being.” The conference focused on how HCI can address global challenges such as climate change, inequality, and technological disruption by fostering meaningful and responsible human-technology relationships. We shared our work in one of the three More-Than-Human Design sessions, and I was delighted to see the growing movement of more-than-human design in HCI—an approach that differs from traditional human-centered design by expanding the focus beyond human needs to include the agency, well-being, and relationships of nonhuman entities. Beyond presenting my work, I was also thrilled to meet and learn from scholars from around the world who are engaging with the same topic. It was inspiring to see how researchers are approaching this area from diverse perspectives—ranging from theoretical frameworks that challenge anthropocentric worldviews, to methodological innovations that center nonhuman agency, to material explorations that foreground multispecies interactions, and to design practices that invite more ethical and reciprocal relationships with the environmental nonhuman. These rich and varied approaches broadened my understanding of what more-than-human design can be and sparked new ideas for my own research moving forward.

Attending CHI 2025 has been an exciting and inspiring experience, offering valuable opportunities to share my work and connect with a global community of researchers passionate about more-than-human design in HCI. Special thanks to the Berkeley Center for New Media for awarding me the conference travel grant, which made this experience possible.