HCI and Environmental Public Policy

Abstract

This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary author's recent work for a policy unit at Global Affairs Canada, which is a federal ministry of the Government of Canada. During that work, the primary author identified several domains of environmental public policy that are of direct relevance to the HCI community. This note contributes a preliminary discussion of how, why, with whom, and in what capacity HCI researchers and practitioners might engage with three types of environmental public policy: climate change, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and green ICT procurement policies. This builds on existing public policy and environmental knowledge within the HCI community and responds directly to calls from some members to engage with environmental public policy.

This Changes Sustainable HCI

“…Within this view, sustainability interventions must be conceived of and evaluated between different scales, over longer timeframes, and across a greater diversity of stakeholders [26,94,101,102]. Researchers have argued that the 'sustainability' of individual ICTs must be considered within the 'ecology of devices' within which they are connected [2,3], and within the wider context of practices which constrain an individual's potential interactions [7,19,65,97].…”

“…These works explore challenges including how to motivate engagement in civic issues such as climate change [48,68,80,84], how to enable citizens to engage in impactful civic participation (beyond 'clicktivism') [15,28], how to replicate successful social movements [14], and how ICTs may enable coordination between civic actors [1]. Other related work has proposed that SHCI researchers themselves embrace their role as activist/citizen [9,48,102], though further discussion is sorely needed around whether and how some (or all) of us doing SHCI may transition to this dual role.…”

A Qualitative Exploration of Perceptions of Algorithmic Fairness

“…Algorithmic fairness, therefore, appears to be a "wicked problem" [72], with diverse stakeholders but, as yet, no clear agreement on problem statement or solution. The human computer interaction (HCI) community and related disciplines are of course highly interested in influencing positive action on such issues [25], having for example an established tradition of conducting research to inform public policy for societal-scale challenges [50,84] as well as providing companies information about how they can best serve their users. Indeed, recent work by Plane et al on discrimination in online advertising is positioned as informing public policy as well as company initiatives [67].…”

Evaluation Beyond Usability

“…Broader societal mechanisms, such as economic [16,25,32,62,68] and political [31,32,61,62,94,95] should be considered by SHCI research as well, but are more difficult to evaluate. An empirical evaluation is usually not possible since a single design idea or prototype will not result in any measurable change of the large-scale political economy.…”