Being The Creek: Mobile Augmented Reality Experience as an Invitation for Exploring More-Than-Human Perspectives

We introduce Being The Creek, a mobile augmented reality (MAR) experience that invites participants to take a “first-person” perspective of a historically-significant-creek by lying alongside her and getting attuned to her environment through embodied multisensory engagement. Individuals experience how the world might appear from the Creek’s perspective, from the pre-colonial respect she received from Indigenous peoples, through the industrial period when the Creek was used as a sewer, to a speculative future of collaborative survival despite capitalism. Fifteen participants of our study each experienced a range of emotions while “being” the Creek through temporal and spatial explorations. As participants moved between human-centered and creek-centered perspectives, they explored the Creek’s unique subjectivity and the human-nonhuman power relations, leading them to de-emphasize the stereotypical human-centric stance. We discuss designing mobile experiences that encourage movement beyond human-centric perspectives and encourage “noticing” for more-than-human worlds.