Navigating the terrain of sustainable HCI

Abstract

Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI." In Proc. CHI '10; 1975-1984 defining it around resource usage and conservation. What counts as success is behavior change or decision making that aligns with the predetermined desired behaviors, although many papers in this genre do not evaluate sustainability.Ambient awareness systems are intended to make users aware of some aspects of the sustainability of their behavior, or qualities of the environment associated with sustainability. The forms of these systems range from devices and physical artifacts to visualizations to instrumented environments and intelligent agents. Two primary design tactics employed in this genre are to make consumption visible in order to prompt awareness of use or to make desirable consumption patterns visible (and aesthetically rewarding). Ambient awareness and persuasive technology overlap, based on the idea that ambiently provided information will persuade users to behave in a sustainable manner.Sustainable interaction design (SID) uses sustainability as a lens to rethink the role and outcomes of design. These works reference design research and are frequently philosophically and critically oriented. While the previous two genres take known approaches in HCI and apply them to sustainability, SID identifies a need to fundamentally rethink the methods of HCI in order to address sustainability. Some research portrays designers as complicit in the unsustainability of current interactive products, aiming to change design to encourage more sustainable effects. The work is often focused on material effects, such as reducing resource waste and pollution, especially due to the rapid obsolescence of current technologies.The scholarship of sustainable HCI has recently exploded. We have been struck by two things: first, the tremendous heterogeneity of methods, orientations, and approaches; and second, the remarkable lack of discussion about the relative merits of those different methods, orientations, and approaches-a debate that, we believe, would further the development of the field. This article, which is rooted in our presentation at CHI'10 [1], presents a map of the current landscape of sustainable HCI that differentiates and organizes the approaches that have emerged in the field and describes emerging topics of dissension. Initiated in August 2009 with 58 peer-reviewed, sustainability-related papers intended for the HCI community, our goal has been to provide a reflective lens for researchers in sustainable HCI allowing for principled discussion of how we have defined sustainable HCI-and how we should going forward. GenresA first glance reveals a variety of research genres for sustainable HCI, i.e., frameworks that structure how researchers define the problem of and the solution for sustainability.A dominant genre in sustainable HCI is persuasive technology: systems that attempt to convince users to behave in a more sustainable way. The design strategies employed include strong persuasion-in which user behavior is judged as sustainable or not-a...

A System Development Life Cycle for Persuasive Design for Sustainability

“…A PSD with a sustainability goal could be made to alter individual users' behavior and to impact a larger part of society. Sustainable HCI has, since 2007, been an active research area of HCI [8]. The persuasive research in the sustainable HCI community is mainly about shaping people's behavior through a system.…”

Universal design as a cause of triggering innovation levels for sustainability-a deliberative concept

“…Persuasion One of the key purposes of design towards sustainability is to persuade its users in the direction of sustainable action. A relatively new research field titled "sustainable HCI" has initiated from this perception [9,10]. UD could be used to expose a new dimension in persuasion by expanding its traditional concept by adding new values in generating new design principles for persuasive design.…”

Sustainable information system design and the role of sustainable HCI

“…Sustainable HCI should thus address WCED's sustainability (understood as a process) put into the multidimensional analysis tool that TBL or QBL provides. Furthermore, Blevis claimed that, a perspective which he called Sustainable Interaction Design (SID), could and should be of the central focus of interaction design [2] which turned the research in sustainable HCI to be multiplied [9]. A conclusion from reading academic articles in sustainable HCI is that no clear definition exists.…”