Mobile apps for nature connection: an oxymoron?
A UX writer and wilderness lover explores whether it’s possible to enrich one’s relationship with nature through screen-based apps.
By Kate Lockhart
“What did you see?”
I stare at the question that appears on my freshly downloaded iNaturalist app.
“I don’t know,” I mutter to myself. “That’s why I uploaded the picture of this purple weeping tree. You’re supposed to tell me!”
The wind blows my hair across my eyes. I move it out of the way to read the tiny print that instructs me to view suggestions behind a question mark. A new window opens, telling me that the mystery tree I’m presently crouched under — for shaded screen-reading — could be in the beech family.
I could click the “i” next to each of the top ten suggested species to learn more, but my knees are aching, and an approaching dog looks like he may mistake my alcove for a pit stop. I select “American beech” to identify the tree, and upload my photo observation to the naturalist community.
The magic of crowdsourcing means someone will respond within a few days and let me know if my assessment was accurate. In the meantime, I check the map to see what nearby species my fellow naturalists have identified. Back to nature.
Or close to it, at least.
Into the woods, with your screen
As a nature connection advocate, I’ve been trying to answer this riddle for years. Can screen-based technology help us reconnect with the natural world? Or is it, as many detractors insist, a blight that stymies development and turns us into anxious, self-centered recluses? Would going outside and playing— with a smartphone—encourage us to explore, even those of us who would be otherwise inclined to stay in?
Hundreds of developers think so. More than a decade of smartphone madness has produced apps that help us navigate, identify, and share our experiences with the natural world. There are apps made for hikers, birders, stargazers, treasure hunters, park fanatics, and citizen scientists. They rely on all sorts of tools, from crowdsourcing to geolocation to machine learning and augmented reality.
I wonder whether the most popular of these apps share an adherence to the three core practices of deep nature connection: wandering, questioning, and storytelling — and if they do, whether they might deserve a hall pass from much-discussed screen time clampdowns. I give them a try.
SkyView brings stars to our iOSs
One app blending a focus on UX with the world beyond is SkyView, which describes itself as “bringing the wonders of space to your mobile device through a fun and intuitive interface.”
Its developers, Terminal Eleven, have delivered on that promise with 20 versions since it’s 2010 launch. SkyView layers a robust augmented reality component over satellite mapping to reveal the constellations, nebulas, galaxies, and planets that hover far beyond your screen. Your phone becomes a viewfinder as you pan across the sky and witness Taurus, the Big Dipper, and other heavenly bodies appear. You can tap on the images to read about the formation, location, and mythology of the object in question. International Space Station buffs can set alerts when the inhabited spacecraft passes overhead every 90 minutes. An easy-to-use Today View widget in iOS lets you set up alerts for can’t-miss celestial events.
These forward-thinking features paired with ease-of-use considerations like night vision filters, single-tap information, and independence from Wi-Fi or GPS signals make the app tempting to use night after night, year after year. More than 25,000 reviews say it all; this tool gets us into nature (wandering), learning new things (questioning), and sharing them with others (storytelling).
The right kind of screen time
Mounting research studies find that a connection to nature helps us mellow down our fight-and-flight consciousness, and makes us more aware of our surroundings. This mindset sets the mood for prosocial activities such as helping, listening, and sharing. In contrast, video games, social media and click bait — things designed to commandeer our attention — have the opposite effect on human physiology: they increase heart rate, stress hormones and inflammation, and decrease awareness of everything but the direct stimulus.
That’s the type of screen time parents want to limit. According to emotion researchers Dr. Michelle Shiota and Dr. Jennifer Stellar, however, screens themselves aren’t damaging. As Shiota says, “There’s nothing about a screen that inherently puts humans to fight-or-flight mode…it just depends on what’s on the screen.”
For example, there’s a bevy of research that finds hospital patients recover faster when exposed to screen images of beautiful nature. Emotion researchers, Shiota and Stellar included, take this positive transference a step further by using screen-based nature images in the laboratory to evoke awe from their participants.
Touch and go with iNaturalist
So what about nature apps that rely on extensive content to teach inquiring minds about landmarks, flora, and fauna — are they true nature connectors? iNaturalist, an app created in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society (and found glowing upon the faces of women crouched in parkland underbrush the world over) is one such tool. Today, the app has more than 400,000 installs, and 386,000 observers.
The app packs a lot of functionality into its little interface. It uses geolocation, machine learning, and crowdsourcing with more than 400,000 scientists and amateur naturalists to make a best guess of the plant and animal species around you. It also uploads your findings to a citizen science database that scientific institutions use to inform their research. Add a snapshot to the app to get a suggested genus, and read through the top ten suggested species to narrow your selection. When you upload it to the community, real people will chime in with identification feedback within days.
This ability to identify a species through crowdsourcing makes some people giddy, like the reviewer who writes: “Before iNat, I was the weird person who liked bugs. With iNat, I have slowly blossomed into an amateur subject matter expert documenting […] and submitting specimens to university entomological collections.”
I could be a buzzkill and complain that it takes three or four taps to get to a logjam of tiny text that has none of the informational hierarchy I need for quick identification. I could bemoan the machine learning component that could confuse a redwood with a red rose, or the fact that I can’t upload a new observation until I’ve made an attempt to identify the first, even if my guess is flaccid and rushed. And I won’t even go into the fact that storage hogs like me run the risk of blowing up their four-year-old cell phones when they make too many observations. But I also see that the app gives people the freedom to discover new things, the confidence to ask things they don’t know, and the reassurance of being part of a larger community.
A few days later, an iNaturalist notification announces that I have responses to my observations. It feels good to know that someone out there cares about the things I care about — enough to generously offer their knowledge. It’s wandering, it’s wondering, it’s sharing. It’s kind of beautiful.
I eagerly check on the comments about my purple weeping tree. There it is, a comment posted by Wolfchin72 declaring: “no beech.”
I sigh. That just about sums up the shifting sands ahead for us nature app UXers. Looks like it’s back to the canopy with my investigation, for now.
Kate Lockhart is a Bay Area-based writer and content strategist, who’s passionate about finding connections between nature and user experience.
