Have We Taken On Too Much?: A Critical Review of the Sustainable HCI Landscape

Abstract

By CHI 2022, ffteen years will have passed since the emergence of Sustainable HCI (SHCI), which now constitutes an important subfeld of HCI. In this paper, we draw on two SHCI corpora to ask: Has SHCI progressed? How has the feld responded to prominent critiques? Have we identifed and adopted constructive strategies for impacting environmental unsustainability? We further show the wide array of competencies SHCI researchers have been called to develop, and how this has been refected in subsequent work. Our analysis identifes signifcant shifts in the SHCI landscape, toward research that is diverse and holistic, but also away from eforts to address the urgent climate crisis. We posit that SHCI has tended to take on far more than it could reasonably expect to deliver, and propose 'Green Policy informatics' as a pathway that enables SHCI to leverage a more traditional HCI skillset in addressing climate change. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Sustainability; • Humancentered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI).

From Exploration to End of Life: Unpacking Sustainability in Physicalization Practices

“…The term Sustainable HCI (SHCI) was coined by DiSalvo et al in 2010 [23], who outlined the research field, unveiling key strands including persuasive technologies for behavior change, formative studies to understand users' attitudes towards sustainability, and works that critically rethink HCI methods for promoting sustainable practices. Sustainable HCI has established itself as a research field, developing and embracing an evolving agenda towards environmental improvement based on the Sustainable Development Goals and beyond [14,37].…”

“…The SHCI community faced critique for its predominant focus on persuasive technologies [23,62], but it has been shifting its research efforts towards more qualitative and speculative approaches [3,14]. The early research on SHCI mainly focused on approaches such as the evaluation of individuals' levels of sustainable behavior based on metrics defined by designers (e.g., [7]) or the eco-feedback about consumption, waste or other aspects related to sustainability (e.g., [2,34]).…”

“…Furthermore, our discussion risks portraying SDP as an approach to absolving feelings of guilt or responsibility of (un)sustainable design practices in both data and physicalization. As part of sustainability, we advocate for developing a reverence for sustainability as an access point, a gradient, a distinct context in flux, but not as an objective measure, drawing from recent work in the field [14,37].…”

Visualizing the Environmental Impact of Dietary Choices: Exploring an Interactive Mini-World as a Proxy to Communicate Three Planetary Boundaries: Visualiser l’impact environnemental des choix alimentaires : exploration d’un mini-monde interactif comme visualisation mandataire pour communiquer trois limites planétaires

“…Similarly, Brynjarsdottir et al argued in 2012 that a focus on persuasive eco-feedback designs was narrowing the vision of Sustainable HCI (SHCI) researchers by simplifying the system in a problematic way [11]. In light of such critiques, SHCI shifted its focus over the last decade, to explore how to take a more systemic approach [9] favouring awareness and reflection, through which users are enabled to learn and to discover the systemic aspects of environmental impacts.…”

A Methodology and a Tool to Support the Sustainable Design of Interactive Systems

“…This suggests that design has great importance in the ecological transition, the biggest challenge facing our society. Sustainability cannot be based on technological solutions [3], but designers must take responsibil ity as part of the problem and as a possible part of the solution [18]. HCI designers, who aim to address human problems [11], must now place sustainability at the heart of their concerns [1].…”