Land, Water and Sun

Designing for Digital Environmental Stewardship in Waste Management

“…While work informed by social practice addresses the critique of individual behavior change by de-centralizing individuals and individual actions, it is less clear how it can tackle infrastructural issues of sustainable change-making with the generative capacity of practice theory still being developed [30,52]. Among other things, this has led to calls from HCI to consider positions, outside of western modernist perspectives, which echoes those from outside the discipline for more holistic perspectives grounded in feminist ecological thought [13,29,49,60]. In one such example in environmental studies, Bennett et al [6] outlines the Environmental Stewardship framework which aims at addressing the change-making attempts in sustainability practices as a complex of relationships among actors (e.g., individuals, collectives), motivations (e.g., moral, monetary rewards), capacities (e.g., infrastructures, personnel), and actions needed (e.g., the introduction of plastic waste sorting).…”

“…Expanding on the Environmental Stewardship framework within HCI, Rossitto et al [51] introduces Digital Environmental Stewardship (DES) which also emphasizes 'folding in actions' (i.e., actions should be seen as interconnected, additive, and generative of other forms of stewardship actions) and reflection in designing for technology-mediated change-making toward sustainability, i.e., how sociotechnical configurations fold into one another and the role of digital technologies in enabling them. Similarly, Cibin et al [13], through their socio-ecological perspective to design, stressed the importance of considering temporalities and the interrelation between social, technology, and environment as these are always transforming and co-evolving. In this study, we deploy the DES framework in an effort to design for stewardship actions that move beyond the individual behavior change perspectives.…”

Reworlding: Participatory Design Capabilities to Tackle Socio-Environmental Challenges

“…Through literature we observed how various capabilities have been articulated in discussing socioecological innovation and nature-inclusive PD, for example through co-creation methods facilitating knowledge mobilisation between actor groups [19], that support bio-inclusive decision-making by acknowledging more-than-human actors [31], and that enable making assumptions about socio-ecological actors more visible in design processes [32]. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly clear that PD capabilities are not merely about facilitating processes with particular sensitivities and ethics, but also require "skills to translate among strategic, mundane, method and design domains, and being aware of how they qualify and permeate each other in order to achieve results."…”