One Byte at a Time: Insights about Meaningful Data for Sustainable Food Consumption Practices

Abstract

Data have played an extensive role in sustainable HCI research by informing the impacts of our behavior on the environment and helping us make better environmental choices. However, in the area of sustainable food consumption and sustainable HCI, there is little investigation on the roles of food data for the design of technology. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of sustainable-conscious individuals' food data seeking experiences. Our results show the way in which the current food data is challenging our understanding of its environmental impacts, which concern data of availability, data representations, and data cultures.Drawing from Loukissas' six critical data principles, we discuss how "locality" and "place" could cast a new insight on food and its sustainability. We also offer possible design directions for sustainable HCI technologies utilizing food data.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

The interlinkage between land resources, food, water, income, and sustainable environment: Evidence from China's economy with COP27 perspective

“…In the case of China, Liu et al (2023) claimed that China's food system emits about 2.4 gigatons of CO 2 e and approximately 50% of its emissions occur during the production stage. To reduce the pollution emissions level, it is essential for the economies to enhance carbon literacy (Lindrup et al, 2023). In the empirical estimations, Li et al (2022) indicated around 3.0 gigatons of CO 2 e, where transportation accounts for 19%, while global freight transportation contributes around 36% of food-miles emissions, approximately double that of the production emissions.…”

Data Cultures: a scoping literature review

“…The largest percentage of papers were classified at this level. This set of 21 papers included considerations of disciplinary networks (papers 19,55) organizations in general (papers 28,58,78), specific types of organization (papers 41,43,47,54,64) and individual organizations (papers 17, 51).…”

Designing Data Interactions for Sustainable Consumption

“…I designed probes to address specific research questions. For instance, one of the questions that emerged at the beginning of the PhD project was how people evaluate the sustainability of food products based on available data (see [87] for more details). For this, a cultural probe was designed that allowed participants to place stickers on food products and write their evaluation criteria on a sheet, in order for them to reflect on their assumptions about sustainable food products (see figure 3.1).…”

“…Contextual interventions include field deployments and enactments (see [87,88,90]). For the field deployments, the participants were provided with the probe with minimal instructions on how to use it, in order to encourage reinterpretations of the probe.…”

“…In addition, digital data shows partial realities, and is often experienced as ambiguous and opaque. Therefore, it is used mainly as part of negotiation processes [87]. While eco-feedback technologies in general have been criticised for having a low impact on behaviour change, few have conducted empirical studies of the impact (e.g.…”