The Toronto Water Atlas: Staging Encounters With Nature Through Design

Recent work in Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) argues that improving our relationship with nature demands designing for nature as plural and multiple. This means moving beyond approaches that impose one version of what nature is, toward sustaining its different enactments and relationships. This paper examines how such ontological multiplicity can be sustained through design. Drawing on Mol’s ontological multiplicity and Stengers’ scene-setting, we present the Toronto Water Atlas, a seven-month design project involving artists, scientists, and community members. Through workshops and coworking sessions, we experimented with various design choices that surfaced and sustained multiple enactments of water, in direct contrast with singular formulations of water prevalent in informatics used for policy and planning. Through this work, we draw attention to the infrastructural biases that restrict ontological multiplicity, and demonstrate how design can more deliberately sustain diverse water ontologies by staging conditions for partial, and relational enactments.