This Changes Sustainable HCI

Abstract

More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCI's role in addressing it. We think this is largely a positive sign, reflective of maturity; yet, lacking a clear set of aims and metrics for sustainability continues to be the community's impediment to progressing, hence we seek to articulate a vision around which the community can productively coalesce. Drawing from recent SHCI publications, we identify commonalities that might form the basis of a shared understanding, and we show that this understanding closely aligns with the authoritative conception of a path to a sustainable future proffered by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything. We elaborate a set of contributions that SHCI is already making that can be unified under Klein's narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI.

Streaming, Multi-Screens and YouTube

“…We suggest we urgently need to confront 'all-you-can-eat' and 'binge' watching more broadly, as the shift to Internet based services has an increasing impact on people, society and the planet. We point to the need for a broad framing to address political activism [37], radical societal transformation [36], and policy [67], to tackle this increasingly signficant concern. But we also acknowledge the need to evaluate SHCI designs with care [54] given the potential for unwanted rebound effects when addressing streaming in future work, as users could end up replacing streaming with more energy-intensive activities; we note our current discussion is limited in this regard.…”

Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services

“…The example we have described here, in line with much of corporate "Design for Environment", can be characterised as "eco-efficiency": design to eliminate unnecessary waste and so reduce associated emissions. Such an approach rightly draws criticism [26,27,46] for several reasons.…”

Software Engineering in Civic Tech A Case Study about Code for Ireland

“…In other related fields, such as HCI, the focus has turned onto examining the a) dynamics of technology in public life, b) civic discourse on social media, c) civic engagement, d) data literacy, e) social justice and f) trust, often using in-the-wild approaches of systems in communities [3,6]. In addition, both SE [24,25,26] and human-computer interaction (HCI) [27,28,29] share a recent turn of interest onto sustainability matters, which has a close link with civic tech, as the focus is put on the environment, peoples' behavior and the role of technology [3].…”