Joana Pestana presents Eden X at CHItaly 2025
Joana Pestana, together with Mariana Pestana, Miguel Carvalhais, and Nuno Jardim Nunes, presented the pictorial Designing with an Assembly of Many: Eden X on rivers, their constituents and rights at CHItaly 2025, the 16th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI, held in October 2025.
The pictorial introduces Eden X, a digital assembly that re-imagines how nonhuman entities can participate in decision-making processes around environmental concerns. Focusing on rivers and their constituents as precursors of nature rights, it showcases a method for establishing a more-than-human constituency where diverse voices deliberate, make proposals, and vote democratically through digital technologies.
Drawing on Ron Wakkary’s notions of constituency and speaking subject, this work contributes an exploratory design methodology that de-centers the human as the sole point of decision-making, offering concrete approaches for engaging nonhuman perspectives within HCI and design practice.
Publication details
Designing with an Assembly of Many: Eden X on rivers, their constituents and rights
Authors: Joana Pestana, Mariana Pestana, Miguel Carvalhais, Nuno Jardim Nunes
Proceedings of CHItaly ’25 – 16th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3750069.3750443
Image credits: © Authors / CHItaly ’25
