Intermittence and Resilience: Speculations for designing "self-healing" communication devices

<p dir="ltr"><i>This poster was exhibited as part of the Victorian Disaster Research Forum 2025, RMIT Kaleide Theatre </i><i>Melbourne VIC, Australia on 10 November 2025.</i></p><p dir="ltr">When a natural event hits a community, they are the first responders, rallying immediate resources at hand to manage the situation. Societies around the world depend on a matrix of infrastructural and technological layers to support the daily operations of life. Outages in these services, particularly in metropolitan areas, are seen as glitches to continuity. This tends to impress upon us the notion of a city in a perpetually operational state, fixating an expectation of pervasive connectivity.</p><p dir="ltr">On the other hand, remote communities with limited access to basic amenities make do with available resources–acknowledging and adapting intermittence as part of their localised environmental identity.</p><p dir="ltr">The loss of a ‘permanent’ connection might ostensibly impart a heavier toll on communities that otherwise rely on perpetual connectivity. Consequently, there are lessons we can learn from remote communities on intermittence, and opportunities to designing communication devices that do not require perpetual operation during extreme natural events–not as a glitch, but as part of its design. Through the lens of speculative design, our interdisciplinary research engages with the potential of designing ‘self-healing’ communication networks using intermittently-connected devices. These prototypes bring to discussion the plausibility of resilient, intermittent communication strategies that complement existing systems.</p>