Examining appropriation, re-use, and maintenance for sustainability

Abstract

Within the past few years, the field of HCI has increasingly addressed the issue of environmental sustainability, primarily identifying the challenges and developing an agenda for designing for sustainability. Yet, the most difficult task remains, how do we develop realistic solutions when the digital ethos is based upon short-lived computing products that come and go at rapid pace. By examining appropriation, re-use, and maintenance practices, this workshop aims to identify sustainable interaction design challenges and directions in re-utilizing used or obsolete computing products for prolonged use.

When the implication is not to design (technology)

“…Furthermore, sensors that break or cease to function after exposure to the elements (and may contain numerous toxic chemicals) will need to be disposed of. This question of disposal goes beyond sensors and gardens; it applies to any computational technologies designed for ostensibly environmentallyfriendly uses [4,19]. Rather than the technological solution of sensor nets, we might explore a social solution, e.g., asking the advice of other gardeners.…”

“…Second, it encourages attending to the complex ways technological interventions reconfigure the situations into which they are introduced. This is not simply a matter of understanding how technology impacts a situation; technologies are used, adopted, and repurposed in ways neither totally determined by the technology itself nor by the context in which it is used [19,20]. Rather, the point is to understand the complex interactions between technology and the context of use.…”

“…Much recent work has explored how HCI technologies can be used to enact environmental sustainability [6,12,13,19,36]. However, it is not obvious that the complex conditions associated with unsustainability-including environmental, political, social, historical, economic, and other factors-are best addressed with computing technology.…”

Second-hand interactions

“…Growing concerns over sustainability have prompted a substantial area of research within the CHI community related to product durability and re-use [2,6,15,16,17,18,23,30] and sustainable consumption more generally (e.g., [31]). Motivated and informed by these concerns, we report a qualitative study of individuals engaged to some significant degree in acquiring used or second-hand goods rather than new goods from firsthand retail sites.…”

Potentials of the "Unexpected"

“…Those workshops aimed at finding systematic approaches to map existing research in order to strive for future research agendas [25], identifying approaches of community appropriation through involving participants in a process of design and appropriation as a tool for reflection [24], but also supporting strategies of sustainability through reuse [13]. Another workshop at CHI aimed at bridging the persisting gap between users, researchers and designers within appropriations research, in order to unite observations and theoretical viewpoints with practical design efforts [3].…”