Designing Biodiversity Systems via Digital Kinships: Insights from Community Data Processes and Creative Practice

Abstract

This study details how digital biodiversity data is used and gains meaning in local restoration projects, how these experiences contrast with large-scale innovation patterns, and what new design recommendations emerge from these insights. Digital innovations in biodiversity technologies are increasingly complex, fast-paced, and driven by technological capacities where data generation rather than biodiversity restoration risks becoming the primary goal. Focusing on a biodiversity restoration project with a living lab community in the Netherlands, this participatory research critically examines how plans for emerging technologies, such as biodiversity simulations and digital twins, contrast with local user relations to biodiversity data. Building on qualitative insights from six-months of fieldwork, a digital and physical data portal was designed to simulate ongoing technoscientific innovation and make their complex effects experientially available to users. Findings are brought directly in conversation with emerging technical features through four distinct themes with the aim to share user-insights and produce design recommendations for: environmental storytelling, prediction and future making, interactive dynamics, and simulation aesthetics. These themes articulate the community's preferences towards digital environments that support their nuanced, complex relationships with local biodiversity, suggesting a shift from top-down technocentric approaches to more community-driven and restoration-focused models. Based on this study, design recommendations are articulated for each of these four themes contributing detailed empirical and practice-oriented insights that propose how new biodiversity technologies can resonate more effectively with local biodiversity restoration efforts.