Environmental Multisensory HCI Design Strategies: Molecules as Storytellers

Human health and well-being are intertwined with environmental health. Through breathing and ingestion, humans and the natural environment share molecules and atoms. Thereby, emerging environmental health problems impact human health, while human actions impact environmental conditions. These interdependencies are difficult to evidence because it permeates the understanding of complexity, multidimensionality and multi-perspective about environmental health problems. However, these are the challenges that designers embrace, in the context of today's global warming events, to explore possibilities for technology and human-environment communication strategies, to raise environmental health literacy. In a previous study, we ideated and investigated a multisensory HCI design strategy with smell and taste. Targeting non-scientific audiences, we explored how chemical sense perceptions could represent environmental problems within digital forms and how these could be applied to communicate interdependencies of environmental health themes, with mixed reality media. The results of our study validated our design strategy and mission. Building on the previous study, in this paper we describe our exploratory study that aims to verify our conceptual approach with stakeholders. Our goal is to answer the research question about how effective is our HCI design strategy for environmental health communication based on molecules as storytellers, from the stakeholder point of view. We presented videos of virtual reality demos and captured quali-quanti data about efficacy, pertinence and future ideations. Findings validated our design strategy, and provide insights about interdependency themes, interaction modes and application opportunities. We discuss our results in the context of environmental health communication HCI strategies.