Sebastian Prost

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at City, University of London

Big Tech, Big Agri, and agri-tech start-ups promise us that digital technologies will make agriculture more sustainable, painting high-tech visions of sensors, AI, and autonomous drones and robots running the data-driven farm. However, many such visions just reinforce the existing unsustainable industrial production paradigm. Since smallholder farm...

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web applicat...

Our food system is a socio-material, heterogeneous infrastructure whose complexity and interconnectedness often remains invisible to citizens. While moments of crisis expose the vulnerabilities and injustices underlying this system, this paper seeks to explore which processes and tools CSCW could purposely design to 'open up' food infrastructures a...

This paper discusses what infrastructuring in participatory design can contribute to processes of food system democratisation. It presents almost two years of engagement with a community-based organisation in a socio-economically deprived neighbourhood in England with the aim of developing a local food hub. It documents how the collaborative work s...

This paper presents Dovetails, an intergenerational co-creative participatory design project, and explored ways of working with recipients of care through Craft methods leveraging reciprocity to support wellbeing and Citizenship. Working alongside older adults from Beamish Museum’s wellbeing community and a children’s charity, researchers supported...

The ‘Smart Home’ is a strongly technology-driven field. While user-centered requirements have been reported for specific features, a considerable gap persists for design based on an everyday home context and the social and emotional nature of the home. To address this, we present a user-centered design process to question and expand narrow framings...

The ‘Smart Home’ is a strongly technology-driven field. While user-centered requirements have been reported for specific features, a considerable gap persists for design based on an everyday home context and the social and emotional nature of the home. To address this, we identify specific leverage points and functionalities for energy-efficiency a...

This article proposes a localised and differentiated understanding of food democracy, or rather a plurality of localised food democracies. Based on the experiences of developing a local food hub in an area of socioeconomic deprivation in the UK using a participatory action research (PAR) approach, it presents local responses to three key challenges...

This paper introduces the concept of 'food democracy' as a theoretical framing for HCI to engage in human-food interaction. Extending existing foci of health and environmental sustainability, food democracy requires thinking through aspects of social and economic justice, and democratic governance as directions for the study and design of technolog...

Besides other popular strategies, such as feedback and (social) comparisons , challenges have been proposed and used to influence people's behavior towards a targeted goal. However, only very limited data on the effectiveness of such approaches and how to best design them is available yet. In this work we report the findings of a two months field s...

This paper presents a novel application of participatory design fiction for sustainable domestic energy consumption. In our study we examine how social practices relate to a newly developed energy management system introduced to households. We explore how design fiction can be used to identify current design limitations and to showcase future desig...

This position paper discusses some of the problems e-participation approaches currently face and a solution approach to overcome them. Central issues include constructive and consensual agreement-finding as well as transparent decision-making.

This paper presents empirical evidence that design for political activism that goes beyond the individual user is crucial for sustainable HCI. The analysis of a series of qualitative interviews conducted during a field trial evaluating a persuasive technology for transport behaviour resulted in 20 factors that influence such behaviour. Factors were...

The goal of this paper, is to provide further insight into the usability of smartphones and dedicated GPS devices for collecting travel survey data at this point in time. For analysis, GPS and accelerometer time series of 31 PEACOX study participants are available, who were tracked simultaneously with smartphones and dedicated devices for 8 weeks....

This paper argues that two open questions exist for HCI in its aim of supporting sustainability: One of networks and one of cultures. The first question is related to HCI's approach in defining sustainability. It this paper, it is argued that actor-network theory (ANT) can help HCI to broaden its understanding of networks of unsustainability. The s...

The SmartWebGrid (SWG) project researched user interactions, technology, economic feasibility, as well as safety, security, and privacy of a universal information platform for future Smart Grid applications. The implemented proof-of-concept of the platform and selected use cases were evaluated with focus on user acceptance of private and business c...

Persuasive technologies are suitable for encouraging green transportation behavior towards CO2 emissions reduction. We focus on persuasive strategies deployed through a choice architecture approach and incorporated in a smartphone application, aiming at providing urban travelers with a solution that will nudge them to consider the environmental fri...

This paper tells four design fictions about future technologies. Two about a sustainable transport future, and two about life with smart grids. The key aspect of these stories is that they are user-generated using innovation games. This has the advantage of not only motivating designers to reflect on their implicit design assumptions, but also deve...

Persuasive technologies are suitable for encouraging green transportation behaviour towards CO2 emissions reduction. For example, such technologies can guide and support users in finding trips that cause low emissions and in the long term change their behaviour and habits towards more sustainable transport decisions. In this paper, we focus on pers...

This paper presents a context-aware, personalised, persuasive (CPP) system design framework applicable to the sustainable transport field and other behaviour change support system domains. It operates on a situational, a user, and a target behaviour layer. Emphasis is placed on interlinking each layer's behaviour change factors for greater effectiv...

As sensors and other pervasive computing technologies are increasingly penetrating ambient assisted living applications researchers, engineers and application architects are starving for tools, techniques and frameworks for building and integrating added-value applications. In this paper we present HERMES, the architecture and implementation of a p...

The workshop will focus on novel computer based interaction mechanisms and interfaces, which boost natural interactivity and obviate the need for conventional tedious interfaces. Such interfaces are increasingly used in ambient intelligence environments and related applications, including application boosting elderly cognitive support, cognitive re...

In this paper, the results of the first user trials of the HERMES system “Cognitive Care and Guidance for Active Aging”, a research project co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Program (FP7) are presented. In particular it describes how elderly users in Austria and Spain tested HERMES MyFuture, which aims to address prospecti...