This paper empirically explores the role that mobile devices have come to play in everyday practice, and how this links to demand for network connectivity and online services. After a preliminary device-logging period, thirteen participants were interviewed about how they use their iPhones or iPads. Our findings build a picture of how, through use of such devices, a variety of daily practices have come to depend upon a working data connection, which sometimes surges, but is at least always a trickle. This aims to inform the sustainable design of applications, services and infrastructures for smartphones and tablets. By focusing our analysis in this way, we highlight a littleexplored challenge for sustainable HCI and discuss ideas for (re)designing around the principle of 'light-weight' data 'needs'.

Abstract-HCI and Ubicomp research often centres around the support of humans interacting with digital technology. Despite this obvious focus, there seems to be less work on understanding how these digital technologies can lead to growth in use, dependence, and influence practices in everyday life. In this paper we discuss how digital technologies have been, and continue to be, adopted in domestic practices-and how the growth of interactions with various ecologies of digital technologies can lead to growth in use and energy consumption. We further the discussion within ICT4S and sustainable HCI on how to promote research that encourages sustainability as a core concern-socially, economically, and ecologically-emphasising that defining limits to growth are important when trying to affect change in sustainable directions. We echo calls for more significant sustainability research from HCI, and set out some avenues of design for moving in this direction.

Tightly regulating indoor building temperatures using mechanical heating and cooling contributes significantly to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. One promising approach for reducing the energy demand associated with indoor climate control is the adaptive model for thermal comfort. In this paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities for supporting the transition toward adaptive thermal comfort in conventionally heated buildings. We replaced the heating control system for eight university undergraduates living on campus for fifty days from January-March 2013. We report on the participants' experiences of living with and adapting to the change in conditions. We reflect on the lessons arising from our intervention for researchers and practitioners seeking to design for sustainability and thermal comfort.

No abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world placed communities under ‘lockdown’. Various practices of consumption were uprooted from their instituted settings and re-rooted in homes. This unprecedented reorganisation of normality resulted in increased instances of domestic consumption as practices occurring in offices, gyms and eateries were forced into homes, demanding the acquisition of materials and altering expectations of what homes are for. This article contributes to literature on COVID-19 and practice-based consumption research by complicating optimistic narratives about the potential for this disruption to downsize the consumer economy. Combining qualitative household interviews, with secondary data about wider trends, and historical reflection on changes in the meaning of the ‘home’ in the UK, we reveal how the re-rooting of instituted practices structures material acquisition and spikes desire for more domestic space. Recognising that professional practices and institutions have taken on increasing significance for domestic consumption, with stay-at-home orders blurring boundaries between home, work and leisure, we conclude by arguing that future research and sustainability policy should attend more to the institutional qualities of practices.

Gig economy platforms are having profound impacts on when and how much we work. But it is not just the qualities of work that are changing, as these platforms have also eroded workers' rights in disempowering workers around the world whilst making use of discourses of empowerment (e.g. flexibility, entrepreneurial values) to promote themselves. 'Switch-Gig' aimed to explore this tension by promoting empowerment and justice through discussions of the future with couriers, focusing on the role of technology in this. By doing this it hoped to provide a more just response to the attempts by digital platforms (e.g. Deliveroo, UberEats) to marginalise and control workers. But this sort of activist work is hard, and it is made harder by the lack of discussion in the LIMITS community about how to weather through the challenges inherent in the processes of ethical and activist research. It is through discussions of the challenges that we can learn not only more about the communities in focus, but also from one another. In order to make space for this discussion within LIMITS, the authors focus primarily on reflecting on their approach to the research and the process itself, over the empirical data of the study. In doing this, they hope to begin a discussion of why LIMITS' researchers should share the pains of their processes, and more effectively mobilise the understandings of the communities we research, to move together along the path to Meadows' vision of 2030, and to start challenging the powerful structures that prevent sustainable change.

Pervasive technologies are already transforming "The Future of Work." Mobile technologies, IoT, and data promise efficient and convenient work "on-demand." They are convenient too for platform providers whose clean and efficient interfaces for consumers disrupt marketplaces, offering digitally mediated access to services at a click. These same technologies provide access to work and labor markets whilst undermining promising flexible work and access to sufficient work. The global gig economy is expanding. Increasing numbers of workers see gig economy work as their main form of employment, yet have little voice in the construction of systems on which they depend. We argue that technologists must work with gig workers, policy makers, and other stakeholders to address the adverse effects of technologies on gig workers. To better understand relationships between workers and the technologies they use, we describe insights from research carried out with U.K. cycle couriers. We reflect on technology's role in giving these workers' agency, rights, and equity by design.

No abstract