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HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics
Abstract
Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. Research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis, and suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI. In particular, I propose that questions of scale -- the scales of action and the scales of effects -- might provide a useful new entry point for design practice.
... [31]) or on incremental instead of systemic change (e.g. [34]). Questions surrounding the unsustainability of digital technologies, in particular data-driven ones [70], have led researchers to call for "more meaningful" digital experiences [113]. ...
Looking for a way out of the current environmental crises requires a critical examination of the role of HCI and technology design. Through a practice theoretic lens, we argue that technological innovation, coupled with economic growth, drives mechanisms like accumulation, acceleration, and stacking, heightening resource demands of daily life. These mechanisms lead to technological dependency as everyday tasks are increasingly delegated to technology, which undermines wellbeing through deskilling, artificialization, and disempowerment. We emphasize HCI's crucial role in these processes, aiming to enhance life's ease, pleasure, comfort, and safety through technological innovation. Drawing on post-growth literature, we argue for a different perspective on the 'good life', embodied by the eco-harmonist, someone committed to effort and skill acquisition. We propose some initial design-guidelines that aim to cater to the eco-harmonist and argue how it might assist HCI designers to shape everyday life to be more in line with the planetary limits.
The topic of time and how it can be unpacked, deconstructed, and designed with is fundamental to HCI, but it is also extensively engaged within artistic practice. By analysing a selection of ten media artworks, all in different ways concerned with time and temporality, we explore how artists approach these matters as culturally and politically loaded. The selected projects align with the ongoing scholarly interest in alternatives to common perceptions on time, unmaking the normative clock time, and the posthuman discourse. Following an analysis of the theoretical and material expressions of these artworks, we conceptualised four themes through which unmaking was represented: dissecting temporality, the unmaking of the singular, unmaking as messing up , and unmaking the other . We close with a discussion on how these themes intersect with the current discourse on unmaking in HCI and reflect on challenges and opportunities for design and theory.
Climate change communication demands narratives that resonate widely. ”Carbon Rebellion,” an Interactive Digital Narrative, exemplifies this by blending personal anecdotes with data-driven content, fostering deep engagement. This research highlights the power of narratives in articulating the gravity of climate change, emphasizing the need for collective action and policy-level interventions. By juxtaposing individual choices against the backdrop of broader societal implications, the narrative seeks to both inspire and empower individuals. The findings reveal that such narratives can elicit strong emotional responses, catalyze critical thinking, and drive proactive climate action. The narrative’s emphasis on community-based efforts highlights the pivotal role of collective endeavors in addressing this global challenge.
The two economic engines that have powered the world through the global recession that set in after 2001 have been the United States and China. The irony is that both have been behaving like Keynesian states in a world supposedly governed by neoliberal rules. The US has resorted to massive deficit-financing of its militarism and its consumerism, while China has debt-financed with non-performing bank loans massive infrastructural and fixedcapital investments. True blue neoliberals will doubtless claim that the recession is a sign of insufficient or imperfect neoliberalization, and they could well point to the operations of the IMF and the army of well-paid lobbyists in Washington that regularly pervert the US budgetary process for their special-interest ends as evidence for their case. But their claims are impossible to verify, and, in making them, they merely follow in the footsteps of a long line of eminent economic theorists who argue that all would be well with the world if only everyone behaved according to the precepts of their textbooks. But there is a more sinister interpretation of this paradox. If we lay aside, as I believe we must, the claim that neoliberalization is merely an example of erroneous theory gone wild (pace the economist Stiglitz) or a case of senseless pursuit of a false utopia (pace the conservative political philosopher John Gray), then we are left with a tension between sustaining capitalism, on the one hand, and the restoration/reconstitution of ruling class power on the other. If we are at a point of outright contradiction between these two objectives, then there can be no doubt as to which side the current Bush administration is leaning, given its avid pursuit of tax cuts for the corporations and the rich. Furthermore, a global financial crisis in part provoked by its own reckless economic policies would permit the US government to finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens except for the ratcheting up of that military and police power that might be needed to quell social unrest and compel global discipline.
When environmental health problems arise in a community, policymakers must be able to reconcile the first-hand experience of local residents with recommendations by scientists. In this highly original look at environmental health policymaking, Jason Corburn shows the ways that local knowledge can be combined with professional techniques to achieve better solutions for environmental health problems. He traces the efforts of a low-income community in Brooklyn to deal with environmental health problems in its midst and offers a framework for understanding "street science"—decision making that draws on community knowledge and contributes to environmental justice.
Like many other low-income urban communities, the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn suffers more than its share of environmental problems, with a concentration of polluting facilities and elevated levels of localized air pollutants. Corburn looks at four instances of street science in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where community members and professionals combined forces to address the risks from subsistence fishing from the polluted East River, the asthma epidemic in the Latino community, childhood lead poisoning, and local sources of air pollution. These episodes highlight both the successes and the limits of street science and demonstrate ways residents can establish their own credibility when working with scientists. Street science, Corburn argues, does not devalue science; it revalues other kinds of information and democratizes the inquiry and decision making processes.
In this chapter, we present an important new shift in mobile phone usage-from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument." We explore how these new "personal instruments" enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most to them. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a working hardware system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community-empowering people to become true change agents.
