Alone and Together: Resilience in a Fluid Socio-Technical-Natural System

Abstract

Disruption to routines is an increasingly common part of everyday life. With the roots of some disruptions in the interconnectedness of the world and environmental and socio-political instability, there is good reason to believe that conditions that cause widespread disruption will persist. Individuals, communities, and systems are thus challenged to engage in resilience practices to deal with both acute and chronic disruption. Our interest is in chronic, everyday resilience, and the role of both technology and non-technical adaptation practices engaged by individuals and communities, with a specific focus on practices centered in nature. Foregrounding nature's role allows close examination of environmental adversity and nature as part of adaptivity. We add to the CSCW and HCI literature on resilience by examining long-distance hikers, for whom both the sources of adversity and the mitigating resilience processes cut across the social, the technical, and the environmental. In interviews with 12 long-distance hikers we find resilience practices that draw upon technology, writ large, and nature in novel assemblages, and leverage fluid configurations of the individual and the community. We place our findings in the context of a definition for resilience that emphasizes a systems view at multiple scales of social organization. We make three primary contributions: (1) we contribute an empirical account of resilience in a contextual setting that complements prior CSCW resilience studies, (2) we add nuance to existing models for resilience to reflect the role of technology as both a resilience tool and a source of adversity, and (3) we identify the need for new designs that integrate nature into systems as a way to foster collaborative resilience. This nuanced understanding of the role of technology in individual and community resilience in and with nature provides direction for technology design that may be useful for everyday disrupted life.