Rethinking plan A for sustainable HCI

Abstract

This paper challenges the sustainable HCI community to move away from a focus on demand and instead address climate change as a supply problem. We identify a new route to impact, namely to focus on addressing the psychological barriers that prevent the political action needed to affect the supply of fossil fuels. Five barriers are explored as a means of revealing new research objectives for the community.

Understanding Energy Consumption at Work

“…At a general level the main implication of our work is that we need to go "beyond individual persuasion". While such an argument had been put forward before by others in the research community, based mostly on reflection and meta-reviews [5,21,26,31], we corroborate such argument through data from our workshops and observations. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, leveraging our findings from the field, we propose three specific directions for the research community where we see opportunities for interactive interventions that complement and go beyond existing interventions.…”

“…Little can be found in the literature to date about the role that interactive technology may take around policy to support sustainability. Even though others have convincingly questioned or criticised the emphasis on individual consumers found behind most sustainable HCI interventions [5,21,26,31,43], it is rare to find explicit and direct references to policies, whether at a company or public level. We consider this to be an important gap in the literature, given the central role that policy plays in the daily life of the workplace as well as, more generally, in society.…”

“…Recent critiques and meta-reviews of sustainable HCI have suggested that a tight focus on individual behaviour is limiting the HCI community's impact on global environmental issues [31,26]. The community has been encouraged to shift away from considering sustainability purely as a resource management issue [43], to question whether new technology can be the answer to sustainability issues [2], and to think more holistically about where consumption happens and why [31,26]. As detailed in our discussion section, our findings strongly resonate with some of the arguments put forward in these critiques.…”

Permaculture as a foundation for sustainable interaction design and UX

“…Some of the key texts that provide a background to this work are; DiSalvo et al's (2010) mapping of the sustainable HCI field, Dourish's paper on HCI and environmental sustainability (Dourish, 2010), Silberman et al's (2014) next steps for sustainable HCI, and Knowles et al's explorations of sustainability and computing (Knowles, Blair, Coulton and Lochrie, 2014). Importantly, our work addresses questions and observations generated from SIGCHI workshops in recent years, in order to push the research onto new ground, and illuminate ways that sustainable HCI practice can be realized.…”

Understanding limits from a social ecological perspective

“…This pioneering body of research work has drawn on theoretical and applied developments that can be related to third wave HCI [6]. They have on the one hand, touched upon key issues related to our everyday practices and culture and, on the other hand, they have overflowed third wave HCI boundaries as these conceptual and applied developments are not only focused on the cultural, emotional, pragmatic or culturalhistorical levels of human experience [6], but also are deeply concerned by environmental [27,28,1], socio-political [13], political economy [26], social sustainability [5], ecological [36] and ethical concerns [18]. These developments are progressively elaborating on a plethora of dimensions that are redefining the focus and object of research within HCI whilst inquiring the very final purpose of the HCI research field in relation to current global societal demands and imminent urges.…”