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Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services: The Case of YouTube
Abstract
Recent research has advocated for a broader conception of evaluation for Sustainable HCI (SHCI), using interdisciplinary insights and methods. In this paper, we put this into practice to conduct an evaluation of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) of digital services. We explore how SID can contribute to corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategies. We show how a Digital Service Provider (DSP) might incorporate SID into their design process and quantitatively evaluate a specific SID intervention by combining user analytics data with environmental life cycle assessment. We illustrate this by considering YouTube. Replacing user analytics data with aggregate estimates from publicly available sources, we estimate emissions associated with the deployment of YouTube to be approximately 10MtCO2e p.a. We estimate emissions reductions enabled through the use of an SID intervention from prior literature to be approximately 300KtCO2e p.a., and demonstrate that this is significant when considered alongside other emissions reduction interventions used by DSPs.
... For instance, Hazas et al. [32] illustrate how growth in data traffic across the Internet increases electricity consumption, while Røpke et al. [72] exemplify similar sustainability implications of family members using multiple devices at the same time. Preist et al. [68] complements this by demonstrating the CO 2 impacts of people streaming video content on their smartphones. However, viewing problematic resource consumption (e.g., sustainable effects of smartphone use) as a design case for individual behavioural change has been critiqued, particularly within sustainable HCI [36,47,65,86]. ...
... Thus, our provotypes should be seen as critical design alternatives [3,[20][21][22]62] that problematise existing smartphone practices in the home, rather than solutions to these problems. Our starting point is the notion that smartphone use can result in individual patterns of use [9,60,61], both in terms of time spent on the phone [74,83] and data consumed [68] that might hinder or disrupt meaningful familiar engagements in domestic settings. In the remainder of this section, we outline the details of our research design for conducting this study. ...
... Yet, most studies do not account for the broader societal implications that increased technology usage may foster. Scholars have, for instance, highlighted that digital technology and smartphone use have complex and hidden sustainable implications, such as growth in data traffic across the Internet puts vast demands on how much electricity is consumed [32] when people stream content on their smartphones [68] and use multiple devices at the same time [72]. ...
... Publications in this space regularly reference the work of orthogonal sciences, including climate science (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions [44,68], carbon footprints [16,67]), ecology (e.g. biodiversity [19,62]), hydrology [43], air quality [1,49] and the extremely complicated world of life-cycle analysis [12]. ...
... This does not mean that quantitative methods are absent from SHCI research, but rather that they are used to evaluate technical systems, not human ones. Calculations of energy demand and/or greenhouse gas emissions [45,68,89] fall into this category. ...
... A subcluster of energy-related research explores the carbon footprint and, more generally, the (un)sustainability of digital technology. This includes online services [68,89], web development [91], machine learning [76] and digital materials [60], and can be conceptualised as work on sustainability in design rather than sustainability through design [58]. Beyond energy, topics of interests include biodiversity [8,19,20,41], food [15,41,42,77] and agriculture [4,41,54,55], fabrication [56,83,92], sea-level rise [8,82], and (e-)waste [73,92]. ...
... They testing about Sustainable Interaction Design for digital services especially youtube. They explore how Sustainable Interaction Design could contribute for greenhouse gas reduction [8]. ...
... On this paper, the usage of the interaction design for giving a good user experience for the users. And then the paper "Model-driven Framework for Human Machine Interaction Design in Industry 4.0" [8] was telling about the human and machine interaction (HMI). The interaction design was used for designing and implementing the human and machine interaction, so the developer require basic and agile answer that lead to the implementation of smart HMI throughout I4.0 scenarios [9]. ...
Utilize the interaction design form the video game "Tapel Saga" with android base to respond the teenager"s mental problem and deliver the good values to the teenagers. In other ways, this interaction design can be used to taking the advatage of the positive side of video game. The main points of its design are focused on four elements where it contains the function, understandability, convinient, and the feeling. This four main point used to allow players are getting the psychological pleasure. When the design has purpose (for example when it was used for open menu) and easy to understand when the user or player get noticed on the first saw, the click doesn"t complex and the user doesn"t bother when press the button, the design would scored as a good design. These good interaction design was very important for the game design so the player could have good experience while playing it. So, this is why the interface of the must be designed so well with the four main point of design element. Because this not only affects the player experience about the convenience while using or play the "Tapel Saga" game, but also affect the player"s emotion and the player"s capability to play the game so well.
... As a consequence, providers, users, and policy makers should participate in efforts to reduce the GHG emissions associated with video streaming (Efoui-Hess, 2019; Preist et al., 2019;Suski et al., 2020). In line with Akenji's (2014) attitude-facilitator-infrastructure framework of sustainable consumption, three different approaches should be followed here. ...
... Second, sustainable behaviour should be facilitated. Platform providers have various design options here, including climate-friendly default settings for provided videos or an audio-only option for music videos or podcasts (Preist et al., 2019). Policy makers can support such business practices by eco-labels or financial incentives. ...
Full text here (open access): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10603-023-09536-9
This online intervention study examined whether system- and action-related information alone, together with goal setting, or together with goal setting and feedback helps people change their video streaming activities in a pro-environmental way. The participants (N=92) documented their video streaming activities for one week prior to the intervention (week 1), three weeks after the onset of the intervention (weeks 2–4), and in a follow-up
period two weeks later (week 7). A reduction of greenhouse gas emissions associated with video streaming was observed over the course of the intervention, together with reduced streaming durations and lowered resolution settings across all groups. There were no differences between the groups. It appears that as regards video streaming, information combined with self-monitoring has considerable potential to change individual behaviour and its associated ecological impact.
... First, it should be noted that a reduction in electricity consumption at the individual scale (e.g., moving from intensive use of digital services to conscientious use) does not represent an absolute decrease at the network scale of digital data transmission and storage. Indeed, as discussed in Preist et al. (2019), from an attributional perspective, a reduction at the individual scale represents a greater amount of electricity being allocated to other network users. Also, it is important to remember that the attributional approach allocates electricity from the network proportional to the amount of data that are used. ...
... For this reason, a large number of studies have used this postulate to quantify the environmental impacts of the use of digital services (Malmodin et al., 2014(Malmodin et al., , 2012Suski et al., 2020). Other studies have used emission factors that are associated with the global electricity mix (Malmodin et al., 2014(Malmodin et al., , 2012Preist et al., 2019). In order to reduce the uncertainty that is associated with the choice of an electricity mix, it seems relevant to use several electricity mixes in the same study to determine the variation in the results. ...
Information and communication technologies (ICT) needs significant quantities of resources and energy to produce and power all of the infrastructure that is related to the use of digital data and the users' electronic devices. To inform Internet users of the impacts of ICT on the environment and the benefits of changing their behavior, we propose a simple, multi-criteria and flexible approach to quantify three environmental impacts caused by the use of digital services in Canada. Our approach consists of quantifying the electricity consumption that is related to the use of digital services and electronic devices. We also consider the carbon footprint of the main electronic devices that are needed to use digital services. The proposed approach was tested through a hypothetical case study including three digital service user profiles, three levels of data transmission and storage performance and three electricity mix. Overall, the main sources of impacts are, in order of importance, the manufacture of electronic devices, the use of electronic devices, and viewing of video streaming. Some iconic digital activities, such as sending emails, contribute very little to a user's annual impact. The results also highlighted the importance of the methodological choices and the data sources used to quantify the impacts of digital services, such as sources of electricity production, energy performance of digital data transmission and storage, and users' behavior. The relevance and limitations of the proposed approach are discussed extensively in the article. Finally, it is essential to establish a shared action plan between citizens, states and companies to build a digital industry that is compatible with planetary boundaries.
... In 2016, it was estimated that around 5% of the world's CO 2 emissions originated from information and communication technology [1]. The same year YouTube alone contributed with 10 million tons of CO 2equivalent emissions [2], roughly twice the annual carbon footprint of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area [3]. ...
... The heat produced by a CPU is closely coupled to its power dissipation. As shown by the conduction equation (2) and the convection equation (3), the amount of heat that is transferred from a processor to the ambient is dependent on the temperature difference between the processor and the ambient. ...
The management of the energy consumption and thermal dissipation of multi-core heterogeneous platforms is becoming increasingly important as it can have direct impact on the platform performance. This paper discusses an approach that enables fast exploration and validation of heterogeneous system on chips (SoCs) platform configurations with respect to their thermal dissipation. Such platforms can be configured to find the optimal trade-off between performance and power consumption. This directly reflects in the head dissipation of the platform, which when increases over a given threshold will actually decrease the performance of the platform. Therefore, it is important to be able to quickly probe and explore different configurations and identify the most suitable one. However, this task is hindered by the large space of possible configurations of such platforms and by the time required to benchmark each configurations. As such, we propose an approach in which we construct a model of the thermal dissipation of a given platform using a system identification methods and then we use this model to explore and validate different configurations. The approach allows us to decrease the exploration time with several orders of magnitude. We exemplify the approach on an Odroid-XU4 board featuring an Exynos 5422 SoC.
... Consequently, the environmental impacts of AI for collective intelligence research should always be considered and reduced using, inter alia, computational resources powered by renewable energy, energy efficient algorithms and coding practices and minimal data duplication. The technologies developed through this kind of research should be evaluated using full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques that measure their direct impacts (e.g., production, use and disposal costs), indirect impacts (e.g., rebound effects that increase carbon emissions elsewhere in the economy) and identify possible mitigations (e.g., substitution and optimisation effects) (Preist et al., 2019). ...
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have great potential to help address societal challenges that are both collective in nature and present at national or transnational scale. Pressing challenges in healthcare, finance, infrastructure and sustainability, for instance, might all be productively addressed by leveraging and amplifying AI for national-scale collective intelligence . The development and deployment of this kind of AI faces distinctive challenges, both technical and socio-technical. Here, a research strategy for mobilising inter-disciplinary research to address these challenges is detailed and some of the key issues that must be faced are outlined.
... Consequently, the environmental impacts of AI for collective intelligence research should always be considered and reduced using, inter alia, computational resources powered by renewable energy, energy efficient algorithms and coding practices, and minimal data duplication. The technologies developed through this kind of research should be evaluated using full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques that measure their direct impacts (e.g., production, use and disposal costs), indirect impacts (e.g., rebound effects that increase carbon emissions elsewhere in the economy), and identify possible mitigations (e.g., substitution and optimisation effects) (Preist et al. 2019). ...
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have great potential to help address societal challenges that are both collective in nature and present at national or trans-national scale. Pressing challenges in healthcare, finance, infrastructure and sustainability, for instance, might all be productively addressed by leveraging and amplifying AI for national-scale collective intelligence. The development and deployment of this kind of AI faces distinctive challenges, both technical and socio-technical. Here, a research strategy for mobilising inter-disciplinary research to address these challenges is detailed and some of the key issues that must be faced are outlined.
... We conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with representatives from digital service providers, telecommunications companies, data centre consultants, and research consultancies. These representatives were chosen as being members of stakeholder groups in the video streaming supply chain within the UK identified as relevant [4]. Some of these organisations spanned more than one identified stakeholder group (i.e., telecommunications and Internet or other digital services). ...
As Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use has become more prevalent, there has been a growing concern in how its associated greenhouse gas emissions will impact the climate. Estimating such ICT emissions is a difficult undertaking due to its complexity, its rapidly changing nature, and the lack of accurate and up-to-date data on individual stakeholder emissions. In this paper we provide a framework for estimating ICT's carbon footprint and identify some of the issues that impede the task. We attempt to gain greater insight into the factors affecting the ICT sector by drawing on a number of interviews with industry experts. We conclude that more accurate emissions estimates will only be possible with a more more detailed, industry informed, understanding of the whole ICT landscape and much more transparent reporting of energy usage and emissions data by ICT stakeholders.
... Typical approaches include top-down assessments (estimates of the overall energy consumption of the system divided by its components), bottomup assessments (estimates energy use of each component through case-studies and combines 5 these figures), and model-based assessments (model system components), and their estimates can differ by up to two orders of magnitude 19,[40][41][42] . The final challenge is to predict the future, especially relating to the adoption of various systems 43,44 and future user behaviors 37,45 , as well as interaction between the system components 46 . Which baseline is selected, how assessment is approached, and which assumptions about future use are taken has a significant impact on the results. ...
Digitalization is a core component of the green transition. Today's focus is on quantifying and pre-dicting the climate effects of digitalization through various life-cycle assessments and baseline sce-nario methodologies. Here we argue that this is a mistake. Most attempts at prediction are based on three implicit assumptions: (a) the digital carbon footprint can be quantified, (b) business-as-usual with episodic change leading to a new era of stability, and (c) investments in digitalization will be delivered within the cost, timeframe, and benefits described in their business cases. We problema-tize each assumption within the context of digitalization and argue that the digital carbon footprint is inherently unpredictable. We build on uncertainty literature to show that even if you cannot predict, you can still mitigate. On that basis, we propose to rethink practice on the digital carbon footprint from prediction to mitigation.
... Typical approaches include top-down assessments (estimates of the overall energy consumption of the system divided by its components), bottom-up assessments (estimates of energy use of each component through case studies and combining these figures), and model-based assessments (model system components), and their estimates can differ by up to two orders of magnitude 19,[42][43][44] . The final challenge is to predict the future, especially relating to the adoption of various systems 45,46 and future user behaviors 39,47 , as well as the interaction between the system components 48 . Which baseline is selected, how assessment is approached, and which assumptions about future use are taken have a significant impact on the results. ...
... Typical approaches include top-down assessments (estimates of the overall energy consumption of the system divided by its components), bottomup assessments (estimates energy use of each component through case-studies and combines 5 these figures), and model-based assessments (model system components), and their estimates can differ by up to two orders of magnitude 19,[40][41][42] . The final challenge is to predict the future, especially relating to the adoption of various systems 43,44 and future user behaviors 37,45 , as well as interaction between the system components 46 . Which baseline is selected, how assessment is approached, and which assumptions about future use are taken has a significant impact on the results. ...
Digitalization is a core component of the green transition. Today’s focus is on quantifying and predicting the climate effects of digitalization through various life-cycle assessments and baseline scenario methodologies. Here we argue that this is a mistake. Most attempts at prediction are based on three implicit assumptions: (a) the digital carbon footprint can be quantified, (b) business-as-usual with episodic change leading to a new era of stability, and (c) investments in digitalization will be delivered within the cost, timeframe, and benefits described in their business cases. We problematize each assumption within the context of digitalization and argue that the digital carbon footprint is inherently unpredictable. We build on uncertainty literature to show that even if you cannot predict, you can still mitigate. On that basis, we propose to rethink practice on the digital carbon footprint from prediction to mitigation.
... Regarding SHCI and sustainable software development, research has largely focused on reducing the environmental impacts of software applications and systems Ð for instance by recommending strategies for low-power web applications [52], technical infrastructure [39], and digital services [40]. Design frameworks have also been ofered to help technologists consider strategies for reducing the energy and space consumption requirements of digital devices [12]. ...
Sustainability has long been a topic of substantial interest the design and human-centered computing communities. With industries increasingly prioritizing climate targets, there is a growing demand for sustainable product design. This paper addresses this need through EcoSketch, a digital tool designed to democratize environmental impact assessments for product designers. Shifting typically retrospective evaluations to the early stages of product development, EcoSketch enables proactive consideration and adoption of sustainable alternatives. Unlike software tailored to environmental scientists, it minimizes the need for specialized training or extensive data inputs. We delve into the development and evaluation of EcoSketch, highlighting its unique features and usability strengths. The paper concludes by discussing design implications and proposing future research avenues to strengthen the intersection of human-computer interaction and sustainable product design, advancing progress on environmental challenges at the systems level.
... To illustrate our methodology, we consider VoD streaming. This use-case has already been addressed by many studies [16], [20], [22]- [27]. All of them, however, focus on estimating the electricity intensity of one hour of video or yearly electricity usage of a video service, while allocating the network part based on volume of data (Wh/GB), or a mix of volume and duration. ...
Assessing the energy consumption or carbon footprint of data distribution of video streaming services is usually carried out through energy or carbon intensity figures (in Wh or gCO2e per GB). In this paper, we first review the reasons why such approaches are likely to lead to misunderstandings and potentially to erroneous conclusions. To overcome those shortcomings, we propose a new methodology whose key idea is to consider a video streaming usage at the whole scale of a territory, and evaluate the impact of this usage on the network infrastructure. At the core of our methodology is a parametric model of a simplified network and Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure, which is automatically scaled according to peak usage needs. This allows us to compare the power consumption of this infrastructure under different scenarios, ranging from a sober baseline to a generalized use of high bitrate videos. Our results show that classical efficiency indicators do not reflect the power consumption increase of more intensive Internet usage, and might even lead to misleading conclusions.
... In this case, they should be able to outsource these tasks to powerful servers or perform the tasks with the help of other devices in a distributed scheme [74]. This reduces telecommunications and thus reduces energy consumption [75]. Edge servers can provide more performance, flexibility, and storage than edge devices. ...
In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive overview on three core pillars of metaverse-as-a-service (MaaS) platforms; privacy and security, edge computing, and blockchain technology. The article starts by investigating security aspects for the wireless access to the metaverse. Then it goes through the privacy and security issues inside the metaverse from data-centric, learning-centric, and human-centric points-of-view. The authors address private and secure mechanisms for privatizing sensitive data attributes and securing machine learning algorithms running in a distributed manner within the metaverse platforms. Novel visions and less-investigated methods are reviewed to help mobile network operators and metaverse service providers facilitate the realization of secure and private MaaS through different layers of the metaverse, ranging from the access layer to the social interactions among clients. Later in the article, it has been explained how the paradigm of edge computing can strengthen different aspects of the metaverse. Along with that, the challenges of using edge computing in the metaverse have been comprehensively investigated. Additionally, the paper has comprehensively investigated and analyzed 10 main challenges of MaaS platforms and thoroughly discussed how blockchain technology provides solutions for these constraints. At the final, future vision and directions, such as content-centric security and zero-trust metaverse, some blockchain's unsolved challenges are also discussed to bring further insights for the network designers in the metaverse era.
... Over the last decades, the energy and power intensities have decreased by several orders of magnitude [33]. For example, the earliest estimates suggested a power intensity of more than 3 kW Mbps before the year 2000, but only 36 W Mbps in 2016 [1], [38]. Recently, it was proposed to extend this simplified view, which just sets the overall energy consumption in relation to the transmitted data, by also taking into account other factors such as the number of users, subscribers, and lines [1]. ...
In recent years, the global use of online video services has increased rapidly. Today, a manifold of applications, such as video streaming, video conferencing, live broadcasting, and social networks, make use of this technology. A recent study found that the development and the success of these services had as a consequence that, nowadays, more than 1% of the global greenhouse-gas emissions are related to online video, with growth rates close to 10% per year. This article reviews the latest findings concerning energy consumption of online video from the system engineer's perspective, where the system engineer is the designer and operator of a typical online video service. We discuss all relevant energy sinks, highlight dependencies with quality-of-service variables as well as video properties, review energy consumption models for different devices from the literature, and aggregate these existing models into a global model for the overall energy consumption of a generic online video service. Analyzing this model and its implications, we find that end-user devices and video encoding have the largest potential for energy savings. Finally, we provide an overview of recent advances in energy efficiency improvement for video streaming and propose future research directions for energy-efficient video streaming services.
... Dabei sind kleine, mobile Endgeräte mit kleinen Bildschirmen sowie kabelgebundene Netze oder mobile 5G-Netze die klimafreundlichste Wahl (Köhn et al., 2020;Stephens et al., 2021). Eine klimafreundliche Möglichkeit, Musik zu streamen, vor allem wenn man sich nur für die Musik interessiert, ist es, eine «Audio-only» Variante zu wählen, oder, wenn via YouTube Musik gehört werden will, die entsprechende Browser-Registerkarte im Hintergrund laufen zu lassen (Preist et al., 2019). Auch für das Musikstreaming gilt, je kleiner das Endgerät, desto weniger THG-Emissionen werden verursacht (Stephens et al., 2021;Tabata & Wang, 2021). ...
The use of digital products and services has continued to increase, especially in recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in both work and private life. For example, people are using video conferencing systems and cloud services more than ever to work from home, ordering more and more products online, and accessing an inexhaustible selection of videos and music titles through streaming platforms. As the use of digital products and services leads to profound changes in working and private life, the question arises to what extent these contribute to a reduction or increase in the emission rate of greenhouse gases and are thus rather an opportunity or a hurdle for the achievement of climate protection goals. Research to date shows that a differentiated approach is necessary here and that blanket estimates of the climate impact of digitalization are not helpful.
... Some engineers (e.g. Malmodin 2021; Preist et al. 2019) argue that more data, as in streaming video and other data-intensive practices, does not necessarily result in more energy consumption. This is because networks and data centers are running 24/7, regardless of data use. ...
Streaming media constitutes a significant proportion of information and communication technologies (ICT), whose electricity consumption and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions are significant and growing. Media scholars should be at the forefront of communicating this urgent message and lobbying companies and governments for change and regulation. We explore the disparities in ICT engineers’ calculation of its carbon footprint and analyze the political alliances informing these calculations, focusing on an attack by the International Energy Agency on the French sustainability think tank The Shift Project. We argue that engineers’ and spokespeople’s optimism regarding the efficiency of ICT is unwarranted for several reasons, including the slowing down of Moore’s Law. We point out that greater efficiency leads to greater consumption (the Jevons paradox). The goal instead should be self-sufficiency and computing within limits, which contests the inevitability of a future based on a growth-based worldview. Technological belt-tightening, we argue, need not be grim: moderation in the use of streaming is a form of creative dissent. Founded by Marks in 2020, with significant participation by Przedpełski, the Small File Media Festival, in which artists conceive movies of no more than 5 megabytes in size, models a joyous and empowered form of computing within limits. These intensive, low-carbon movies and the festival as a whole embody the following calls to action: Present alternative future scenarios to growth! Create affective and haptic modes of encounter! Disrupt perceptual and behavioural clichés! Accelerate imagination by juxtapositions of imagery and themes!, and finally, Bring the cosmos to your doorstep!
... The largest share of IP data traffic takes place within data centers [108], which, together with the networks, account for about half of the sector's operational electricity demand [76]. The networks' contribution to that demand is determined by the type of access network (mobile vs. fixed, optical fiber vs. ADSL), bandwidth, utilization factor of network components, and the kind of access device used [103,[109][110][111]. ...
ICT hold significant potential to increase resource and energy efficiencies and contribute to a circular economy. Yet unresolved is whether the aggregated net effect of ICT overall mitigates or aggravates environmental burdens. While the savings potentials have been explored, drivers that prevent these and possible counter measures have not been researched thoroughly. The concept digital sufficiency constitutes a basis to understand how ICT can become part of the essential environmental transformation. Digital sufficiency consists of four dimensions, each suggesting a set of strategies and policy proposals: (a) hardware sufficiency, which aims for fewer devices needing to be produced and their absolute energy demand being kept to the lowest level possible to perform the desired tasks; (b) software sufficiency, which covers ensuring that data traffic and hardware utilization during application are kept as low as possible; (c) user sufficiency, which strives for users applying digital devices frugally and using ICT in a way that promotes sustainable lifestyles; and (d) economic sufficiency, which aspires to digitalization supporting a transition to an economy characterized not by economic growth as the primary goal but by sufficient production and consumption within planetary boundaries. The policies for hardware and software sufficiency are relatively easily conceivable and executable. Policies for user and economic sufficiency are politically more difficult to implement and relate strongly to policies for environmental transformation in general. This article argues for comprehensive policies for digital sufficiency, which are indispensible if ICT are to play a beneficial role in overall environmental transformation.
... Sustainability through Design, on the other hand, applies HCI approaches to support sustainable lifestyles and decision-making -i.e., address sustainability as a problem domain. 9 out of 77 works in our corpus can be classifed as Sustainability in Design research and, not surprisingly, they all tackle the environmental bottom line (4 articles dealing with energy [56,99,116,118] and 5 in the domain of waste [8,10,34,61,117]). Compared to results from a previous literature review on Sustainability and HCI [5], our analysis suggests an inclination towards increasing research on this area, as called for by Mankof [82]. ...
Sustainable Development (SD) in its dimensions – environment, economy, and society – is a growing area of concern within the HCI community. This paper advances a systematic literature review on sustainability across the Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) body of work. The papers were classified according to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework to understand how the pillars of SD play into the HCI discourse on sustainability. The economic angle was identified as a gap in SHCI literature. To meet the TBL of SD, however, a balance needs to be sought across all ‘lines’. In this paper, we propose that HCI can advance the discussion and the understanding of the economic concepts around sustainability through taking a sociology perspective on the economic angle of the TBL. We sustain this claim by discussing economic concepts and the role that digital can play in redefining the established foundations of our economic system.
... Both policymakers, and the technology industry, need to do more to combat the ever-growing demand for data and its associated energy impacts. If done, the energy savings could be considerable: as researchers have pointed out, "just" removing the video streams for YouTube content that end-users only listen to, could have a comparable reduction in emissions to running a datacenter on renewable energy [19]. Furthermore, future technology development trajectories (e.g. ...
Both policymakers and the technology industry need to do more to combat the ever-growing demand for data and its associated energy impacts. In this study, based on novel corporate data, expert interviews, focus groups with members of the public, extensive site visits across Greenland, Iceland and Norway and a literature review, we look at the energy and climate impacts of existing and proposed datacenters, both quantitatively and in terms of stakeholder and public perceptions. The paper examines datacenter management and sustainability practices in the Nordic region. It explores what community impacts occur, and how communities manage conflicting objectives. It investigates the technical and policy options that can make datacenters more sustainable and/or lower-carbon and it explores associated stakeholder and public views in the three countries. In exploring these themes, our study examines the shifting energy governance of datacenters, including patterns of electricity consumption and cooling but also circular economy operations and power densities. We also analyze a series of 40 solutions for eco-friendly design or green datacenter management across the entire lifecycle. We conclude with implications for energy and climate policy as well as future research.
... A micro level approach has been used to describe the environmental burdens generated by specific electronic devices, equipment and telecommunication infrastructures involved in the provision of digital services (Aleksic and Mujan, 2018;Bovea et al., 2018;Hischier et al., 2015;Moberg et al., 2014a;Schien et al., 2015;Shehabi et al., 2016). Useful (and sometimes conflicting) results have been reported on the environmental sustainability of certain ICT services such as online video (Efoui-Hess, 2019; IEA, 2020a; Preist et al., 2019), online advertising (Pärssinen et al., 2018) or cloud computing (Baliga et al., 2010;Chatzithanasis and Michalakelis, 2018). ...
The aim of this work is to quantify, assess, and identify hotspots in the environmental sustainability of newly constructed ICT networks designed to provide internet access (4 G LTE mobile technology) to regions still lacking this service. The analysis has been carried out on six demographic areas, from high-density urban and peri‑urban to remote rural, using ISO 14,040. A Dynamic Inventory Model (DIM) relating demographic/connectivity features with foreground material and energy inventories was validated using real data from Peru. The results showed carbon footprints between 81 and 103 kg CO2 eq./subscription/year, equivalent to 1.35 – 1.73 kg CO2 eq./Gb. Most of this (between 68 and 86%) correspond to end user devices, primarily in the form of embodied emissions. Operational emissions account for about one-third of the total and derive primarily from the electricity consumed by end user devices, and to a lower extent by access networks and data centers. Linear correlations were observed between operational - embodied carbon emissions and the number of subscribers. This trend was overturned in very small ICT networks designed to serve sparsely populated rural areas, due to higher energy consumption and carbon emissions per functional unit generated by access and IP network components. The robustness of these results was studied through sensitivity and uncertainty analyses.
... Blevis et al. [10] have synthesised and connected frameworks from Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) and Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Design (SDID). By expanding the principles of SID (as formulated in 2007), it has also been shown that the framework not only can contribute to making interaction design more sustainable, but that SID principles also can be applied to corporate greenhouse gas reduction strategies [80]. ...
Sustainable HCI (SHCI) constitutes a relatively new research field within HCI. We have identified four literature reviews of the field conducted between 2009-2014. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed conference and journal articles that have been published in the field during the last ten years (2010-2019). To this end, we apply the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to classify and discern high-level goals SHCI researchers have worked towards during this period. This paper contributes to HCI by 1) identifying Sustainable Development Goals that SHCI researchers have worked towards, 2) discerning main research trends in the field during the last decade, 3) using the SDG framework generatively to enumerate and reflect on areas that this far have not been covered by SHCI research and 4) presenting takeaways and opportunities for further research by the larger HCI community.
... Showing the plans to convert the in-person conference into an online conference. The text in black boxes shows the technology that we chose in order to achieve these aims all of which are critical determinants of energy consumption (Preist et al., 2019). Therefore, an accurate calculation of the carbon footprint of our meeting is beyond the scope of this paper, but we applied a calculation based on 2011 technologies to determine the carbon outputs of streaming video (Shehabi et al., 2014). ...
In‐person academic conferences are important to disseminate research and provide networking opportunities. Whether academics attend in‐person conferences is based on the cost, accessibility, and safety of the event. Therefore, in‐person conferences are less accessible to academics and stakeholders that are unable to overcome some of these factors, which then act as a barrier to equal and inclusive participation. Additionally, the carbon footprint of conference travel is increasingly becoming a factor in deciding on whether to attend a conference. Online conferences may provide opportunities to mitigate these challenges. Here, we illustrate how a learned society can move their conference online. Then, comparing data acquired from the virtual conference and previous in‐person conferences, we explore the aids and barriers influencing the decision of delegates to attend the meetings. Ultimately, moving meetings online aids delegate participation by removing concerns about travel, cost, and carbon emissions, but there remains a barrier to participation as online meetings are perceived as less effective for networking and social opportunities.
... Current approaches toward measuring the ecological impact of applications lack the ability to model the long term evolution and dynamic nature of IoT deployments. Preist et al. [15] use the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to measure the estimated global carbon footprint of YouTube for the 2016 year. The LCA method captures the current state of the system using past information to calculate the carbon footprint. ...
... A simple search on Google, for example, has the energy equivalence of turning on a 60-watt light bulb for 17 s [91]. The energy consumption of the video streaming service YouTube for the year 2016 has been estimated to be 19.6 TWh, leading to greenhouse emissions comparable to the annual emissions of an urban area such as Glasgow, Frankfurt, or Quito [92]. Information is not an ethereal entity that is free of any materiality, and this example shows that storing, transmitting, retrieving, or processing it has environmental consequences. ...
Wearable technologies involve the integration of technology into clothing or accessories to bring new functionalities for people on the move. Many examples of wearables are emerging, from simple fitness tracking watches to electronics deeply embedded into garments for multi-touch sensing and control for personal music players. Without careful development, wearables can have a negative impact on the environment due to increased production of electronic components, increased e-waste from abandoned devices, and increased energy usage. We examine environmental sustainability issues through a review of recent research and cases across three broad areas including the fashion industry, information and communications technology (ICT), and wearable technologies. In the analysis, we examine stages in the product life cycle and identify the unique issues for each sector, including the extraction of materials, production process, distribution of products, use, and disposal of products that have reached the end of their life. The findings are gathered as implications for design so that researchers, educators, designers, developers, and product managers will gain an overview of the issues related to environmental sustainability. Related examples of products and prototypes are provided to enable informed choices during the design and development of wearables that are more environmentally sustainable.
... Let us look at just one example: watching YouTube videos on a mobile phone. Preist et al. (2019) provide a detailed analysis of the energy and CO2 emissions from watching YouTube videos. Figure 24 shows that YouTube servers themselves only consumed 353 GWh per year, 3 whereas the use of core and metro networks (1,850 GWh per year), access networks (4,418 GWh per year), user devices (6,091 GWh per year), and especially cellular networks (8,507 GWh per year) are using many times more energy to watch those YouTube videos. ...
... These new providers encourage media consumption on the move, through the provision of short videos which can be engaged with quickly. As a result, they are accessed far more often over mobile services, and so, mobile network equipment is a significant hotspot (Preist et al., 2019). It has been commonly argued that the overall energy use and carbon footprint of digital technology globally is significant and roughly comparable in size to that of the aviation industry. ...
The substitution of material-based services with digital services—for example films or music—alters the environmental impact of our everyday activities and shifts visible material use to less visible digital services. A holistic life cycle assessment (LCA) of digital transformation requires the assessment of information and communication technology (ICT) with its wide range of multifunctional devices as well as substitution and summation effects caused by new services enabled by modern ICT. The 73rd Discussion Forum on Life Cycle Assessment (DF LCA) was held on 21 November 2019 to discuss the environmental implications of digital transformation in view of the effective as well as the potential environmental impacts. While currently being a small but already relevant contributor to the overall greenhouse gas emissions, the relevance of the ICT sector is predicted to grow rapidly within the next 5 to 10 years (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018). This 1-day forum offered the possibility to discuss current as well as potential future implications of devices as well as digital services on the environment.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are generally believed to have significant potential to reduce energy intensity. In contrast to previous empirical studies, which have relied on aggregated data, we conduct the first large-scale firm-level investigation into this relationship. Our results, which are based on administrative panel data on 28,600 German manufacturing firms, confirm a robust negative relationship between software capital (our proxy for the degree of firm digitalization) and energy intensity for the years 2009 to 2017. However, the effect size is rather small. For the average firm, we find that a 1 percent increase in software usage relates to a decrease in energy intensity by 0.003 percent. Hence, contrary to previous industry-level results, we do not observe substantial energy intensity improvements in connection with ICT adoption. Moreover, we find that the relationship between ICT and energy intensity exhibits properties that can lead to an aggregation bias.
JEL Classification: C32, H23, O33, O38, Q56, Q58.
Este capítulo aborda la problemática relación que mantienen los medios de comunicación con la sostenibilidad medioambiental en un ecosistema en el que la esfera digital se ha convertido en el escenario de gran parte de las interacciones sociales cotidianas. La falsa percepción de que la tecnología digital carece de impacto material ha contribuido a presentar las soluciones digitales como un ejemplo de transición ecológica responsable. Siendo cierto que estas transformaciones pueden reducir el impacto de las sociedades industriales clásicas, la promoción de su empleo a escala global, ubicua y constante provoca efectos dañinos para el medio ambiente. Así, este capítulo analiza la digitalización prestando atención a sus efectos en cinco fases diferenciadas: a) el diseño de dispositivos tecnológicos orientados hacia un consumo acelerado y una renovación permanente, b) la extracción de los materiales necesarios para fabricar y mantener el entramado digital que habitamos, c) el proceso de manufactura con sus conflictivas relaciones sociales, económicas y laborales, d) el empleo por parte de individuos y grupos, y e) la gestión de los crecientes desechos tecnológicos. Adicionalmente, se completa un primer abordaje sobre las políticas de responsabilidad social corporativa de las principales corporaciones globales en el sector tecnológico, centrado en las propuestas formuladas en materia de sostenibilidad.
In recent years, the global use of online video services has increased rapidly. Today, a manifold of applications, such as video streaming, video conferencing, live broadcasting, and social networks, make use of this technology. A recent study found that the development and the success of these services had as a consequence that, nowadays, more than 1% of the global greenhouse-gas emissions are related to online video, with growth rates close to 10% per year. This article reviews the latest findings concerning energy consumption of online video from the system engineer’s perspective, where the system engineer is the designer and operator of a typical online video service. We discuss all relevant energy sinks, highlight dependencies with quality-of-service variables as well as video properties, review energy consumption models for different devices from the literature, and aggregate these existing models into a global model for the overall energy consumption of a generic online video service. Analyzing this model and its implications, we find that end-user devices and video encoding have the largest potential for energy savings. Finally, we provide an overview of recent advances in energy efficiency improvement for video streaming and propose future research directions for energy-efficient video streaming services.
This paper presents a systemic literature review of Sustainable Interaction Design. We use the PRISMA model to guide the review. In the analysis of the identified papers, we identify an emergent and significant shift in the discourse on Sustainable Interaction Design from its original introduction in 2007. The shift in discourse concerns extensions both in the methodology as well as the impact, which is oddly underexplored. Regarding the methodology, we found that the objectives of sustainability are pursued by the concrete features of designed artifacts or through the use impact of design and that the design contains a process of learning for all participating parties, captured in the notion of sustainability in designing. By complementing this with the pursued impact of social, environmental, and economic sustainability, we point to where the current research tends to cluster, which areas are underexplored, and, thus, where new research agendas are needed. Here, the limited interest in studying how Interaction Design fosters sustainability while including an economic perspective stands out. In the concluding parts of this paper, we propose future research trajectories of SID and speculate and discuss opportunities and challenges for future research.
In the digital era, YouTube serves as a crucial platform for information dissemination, spanning entertainment, education, and more. However, the issue of misinformation undermines its reliability. This study investigates trust and legitimacy within YouTube’s content ecosystem, focusing on the experiences of users in Bangladesh. By exploring factors like creator reputation, content presentation, and social validation, we identify key elements that shape user trust. Using a mixed-methods approach, including surveys (n=71) and interviews (n=19), our research fills existing gaps and contributes to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). Understanding these dynamics is vital for fostering a more informed and trustworthy online community.
The international treaty known as the Paris Agreement requires global greenhouse gas emissions to decrease at a pace that will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Given the pressure on all sectors to reduce their emissions to meet this target, the ICT sector must begin to explore how to innovate under constraint for the first time. This could mean facing the unprecedented dilemma of having to choose between innovations, in which case the community will need to develop processes for making collective decisions regarding which innovations are most deserving of their carbon costs. In this paper, we expose tensions in collaboratively prioritising ICT innovation under constraints, and discuss the considerations and approaches the ICT sector may require to make such decisions effectively across the sector. This opens up a new area of research where we envision HCI expertise can inform and resolve such tensions for values-based and target-led ICT innovation towards a sustainable future.
The environmental impact of video streaming services has been discussed as part of the strategies towards sustainable information and communication technologies. A first step towards that is the energy profiling and assessment of energy consumption of existing video technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive study of power measurement techniques for video encoding and decoding that is comparing the use of hardware and software power meters. An experimental methodology to ensure reliability of measurements is introduced. Key findings demonstrate the high correlation of hardware and software based energy measurements for the case of two video codecs across different spatial and temporal resolutions at a lower computational overhead. Index Terms-power measurements, energy consumption, hardware power meter, software power meter, video codecs.
Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically increased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through the lens of three interdependent elements of the Anthropocene: ( a) planetary boundaries and stability, ( b) equity within and between countries, and ( c) human agency and governance, mediated via ( i) increasing resource efficiency, ( ii) accelerating consumption and scale effects, ( iii) expanding political and economic control, and ( iv) deteriorating social cohesion. While direct environmental impacts matter, the indirect and systemic effects of digitalization are more profoundly reshaping the relationship between humans, technosphere and planet. We develop three scenarios: planetary instability, green but inhumane, and deliberate for the good. We conclude with identifying leverage points that shift human–digital–Earth interactions toward sustainability.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 47 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Growing and even excessive use of digital technology has unquestionably fuelled demand for digital devices and online services leading to a wide range of societal and environmental impacts. In sustainability terms, ICT as a whole is estimated to produce up to nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As presumed responsible innovators, the HCI community should now consider design strategies that will reduce use and demand for digital technology for the good of both its users and the planet—strategies perhaps even seen as retrogressive in an era where digital technology is constantly implicated in innovation and economic growth. Prior work has noted the potential to design ‘more moderate’ interactions for sustainability, simultaneously addressing negative societal impacts on users’ wellbeing, relationships, productivity at work, and privacy. In this paper, we explore how we may design intentionally moderate digital interactions that retain our participants’ ‘more meaningful’ experiences. We report on the outcomes of two design workshops to uncover experiences of meaningful device and service use, to inform practical designs for ‘moderate and meaningful’ interaction. From this, we offer design recommendations that aim to address the multiple negative impacts that digital technology can create, and discuss the possible barriers to these designs.
This study illustrates how the osadebe’s regression model was implemented on the visual basic software and used in speculating the split tensile strength of chikoko-cement concrete. 25 selected mix proportions of concrete produced from portland cement, chikoko mud, river sand and granite chippings were studied. A model was developed using the first 15 mixes and their accompanying 28days split tensile strength. The leftovers were applied in model validation. T-statistics was adopted in testing the correctness of the model at 95% confidence level. A 2.26 critical t-value was obtained from table while calculate t-value was 1.43. Seeing that the critical t-value is higher than the calculated one, the model is said to be fit. Standard deviation of 0.0767 was obtained between the observed and predicted values. Since this value is close to 0, the predictions made are close to the mean value. Consequently, the regression model can serve as a useful tool for forecasting. Best strength of 2.117MPa was obtained from mix TR1. While, the least strength of 1.165MPa was obtained from mix TR4. The visual basic software was used to write a program for implementing the model. This made the process of mix design quite easy, and very user friendly.
Index Terms—Chikoko-cement concrete, mix-ratio, split tensile strength, visual basic software.
Use of social media for knowledge sharing among undergraduates
This paper asks what we can learn from edge computing about the commitment of Big Tech to diminish its ecological footprint. The text starts with the COVID-19 pandemic being framed as opportunity for more sustainability and unpacks edge computing as one of the elements proposed as a solution, next to working from home. It interrogates the discourse behind these solutions, one of technological fixes that allow ‘business as usual’ to continue, undisturbed by government regulations, outsourcing the burden of environmental responsibility to citizens. The paper draws parallels between edge computing, Big Tech’s approach to sustainability and the history of the Sustainable ICT discourse and proposes that to truly diminish ICT’s footprint, a refusal of the burden of computation and digital enclosure (vendor lock-in) is needed, by collectively building and financing network services.
This article investigates misinformation chains – fake news and clickbait – related to the 2019 oil spill along the coast of Northeast Brazil. A link between the intensive use of misinformation on YouTube and the environmental impact of digital media and algorithmic performativity has been found by analyzing videos about the 2019 Brazilian oil spill. A total of 591 YouTube videos were extracted based on a search for the hashtags ‘oleononordeste’, ‘vazamentopetroleo’, and ‘greenpixe’. The data thus obtained suggest that most of the corpus (80.37%) consists of misinformation, of which 65.82% (389 videos) is clickbait and 14.55% (86 videos) fake news. YouTube misinformation videos produced around 1.42 MtCO 2 e, the equivalent of burning 3.30 barrels of oil. We argue that misinformation chains increase pollution and carbon footprint as a result of at least three factors: (a) the extra energy cost of feeding algorithms; (b) increased algorithmic resistance to the visibility of journalistic information; and (c) undermining public debate about environmental catastrophes in favor of private interests (fake politics).
While it is understood that cities generate the majority of carbon emissions, for most cities, towns, and rural areas around the world no carbon footprint (CF) has been estimated. The Gridded Global Model of City Footprints (GGMCF) presented here downscales national CFs into a 250 m gridded model using data on population, purchasing power, and existing subnational CF studies from the US, China, EU, and Japan. Studies have shown that CFs are highly concentrated by income, with the top decile of earners driving 30%–45% of emissions. Even allowing for significant modeling uncertainties, we find that emissions are similarly concentrated in a small number of cities. The highest emitting 100 urban areas (defined as contiguous population clusters) account for 18% of the global carbon footprint. While many of the cities with the highest footprints are in countries with high carbon footprints, nearly one quarter of the top cities (41 of the top 200) are in countries with relatively low emissions. In these cities population and affluence combine to drive footprints at a scale similar to those of cities in high-income countries. We conclude that concerted action by a limited number of local governments can have a disproportionate impact on global emissions.
The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.
Road congestion, air pollution and sustainability are increasingly important in major cities. We look to understand how last-mile deliveries in the parcel sector are impacting our roads. Using formative field work and quantitative analysis of consignment manifests and location data, we identify how the effectiveness of life-style couriers is contributing to both environmental and non-environmental externalities. This paper presents an analysis of delivery performances and practices in last-mile logistics in central London, quantifying the impacts differing levels of experience have on overall round efficiency. We identify eleven key opportunities for technological support for last-mile parcel deliveries that could contribute to both driver effectiveness and sustainability. We finish by examining how HCI can lead to improved environmental and social justice by re-considering and realizing future collaborative visions in last-mile logistics.
More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCI's role in addressing it. We think this is largely a positive sign, reflective of maturity; yet, lacking a clear set of aims and metrics for sustainability continues to be the community's impediment to progressing, hence we seek to articulate a vision around which the community can productively coalesce. Drawing from recent SHCI publications, we identify commonalities that might form the basis of a shared understanding, and we show that this understanding closely aligns with the authoritative conception of a path to a sustainable future proffered by Naomi Klein in her book emphThis Changes Everything. We elaborate a set of contributions that SHCI is already making that can be unified under Klein's narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI.
Many authors have proposed criteria to assess the ‘‘environmental friendliness’’ or ‘‘sustainability’’ of
software products. However, a causal model that links observable properties of a software product to
conditions of it being green or (more general) sustainable is still missing. Such a causal model is necessary
because software products are intangible goods and, as such, only have indirect effects on the physical
world. In particular, software products are not subject to any wear and tear, they can be copied without
great effort, and generate no waste or emissions when being disposed of. Viewed in isolation, software
seems to be a perfectly sustainable type of product. In real life, however, software products with the same
or similar functionality can differ substantially in the burden they place on natural resources, especially
if the sequence of released versions and resulting hardware obsolescence is taken into account. In this
article,wepresent a model describing the causal chains from software products to their impacts on natural
resources, including energy sources, from a life-cycle perspective.Wefocus on (i) the demands of software
for hardware capacities (local, remote, and in the connecting network) and the resulting hardware energy
demand, (ii) the expectations of users regarding such demands and how these affect hardware operating
life, and (iii) the autonomy of users in managing their software use with regard to resource efficiency.
We propose a hierarchical set of criteria and indicators to assess these impacts. We demonstrate the
application of this set of criteria, including the definition of standard usage scenarios for chosen categories
of software products. We further discuss the practicability of this type of assessment, its acceptability for
several stakeholders and potential consequences for the eco-labeling of software products and sustainable
software design.
Designing technology with sustainability in mind is becoming more and more important, especially considering future scenarios of limited resources where the world's current lifestyle of wasteful consumption needs to change. But how can researchers believably argue that their solutions are indeed sustainable? How can consumers and technology users reliably acquire, understand, and apply information about environmental sustainability? Those questions are difficult to answer, especially in research domains where the impact on sustainability is not immediately measurable, such as sustainable HCI. The evaluation of sustainability is an ongoing problem that is often glossed over, but we believe the community needs to intensify its efforts to articulate its evaluation methods to other disciplines and external stakeholders. Even if those disciplines and stakeholders understand the importance of designing for sustainability, we need convincing arguments -- such as validation through thorough evaluations -- to showcase why a specific design solution works in the real world. In this paper, we analyze this problem by highlighting examples of sustainable HCI research in which evaluation of sustainability failed. We also look at previous research that sought to address this issue and discuss how their solutions can be generalized -- and when they might fail. While we do not have the final answer, our intention is to start a discussion as to why sustainable HCI research is oftentimes not doing enough to justify the validity of its solutions. We close our paper by suggesting a few examples of what we believe to be potential ways to address those issues and take action to improve the evaluation of sustainability.
This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary author's recent work for a policy unit at Global Affairs Canada, which is a federal ministry of the Government of Canada. During that work, the primary author identified several domains of environmental public policy that are of direct relevance to the HCI community. This note contributes a preliminary discussion of how, why, with whom, and in what capacity HCI researchers and practitioners might engage with three types of environmental public policy: climate change, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and green ICT procurement policies. This builds on existing public policy and environmental knowledge within the HCI community and responds directly to calls from some members to engage with environmental public policy.
Motivated by mobile devices' growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an account of how data demand has meaning and utility in our participants' social practices, and the timing and relative impacts of these. We then assess the scale of this demand by drawing comparison between our fine-grained observations and a more representative dataset of 398 devices from the Device Analyzer corpus. Our results highlight the significant categories of data demanding practice, and the identification of where changes in app time and duration of use might reduce or shift demand to reduce services' impacts.
The recent integration of thermal cameras with commodity smartphones presents an opportunity to engage the public in evaluating energy-efficiency issues in the built environment. However, it is unclear how novice users without professional experience or training approach thermographic energy auditing activities. In this paper, we recruited 10 participants for a four-week field study of end-user behavior exploring novice approaches to semi-structured thermographic energy auditing tasks. We analyze thermographic imagery captured by participants as well as weekly surveys and post-study debrief interviews. Our findings suggest that while novice users perceived thermal cameras as useful in identifying energy-efficiency issues in buildings, they struggled with interpretation and confidence. We characterize how novices perform thermographic-based energy auditing, synthesize key challenges, and discuss implications for design.
There is a blind spot in HCI’s evaluation methodology: we rarely consider the implications of the fact that a prototype can never be fully evaluated in a study. A prototype under study exists firmly in the present world, in the circumstances created in the study, but its real context of use is a partially unknown future state of affairs. This present–future gap is implicit in any evaluation of prototypes, be they usability tests, controlled experiments, or field trials. A carelessly designed evaluation may inadvertently evaluate the wrong futures, contexts, or user groups, thereby leading to false conclusions and expensive design failures. The essay analyses evaluation methodology from this perspective, illuminating how to miti- gate the present–future gap.
This discussion paper considers the nature of growth in data traffic across the Internet, as a basis for asking whether and how such growth might slow down or otherwise be limited. Over the last decade, data growth has been dramatic, and forecasts predict a similar ongoing pattern. Since this is associated with increasing electricity consumption, such a trend is significant to global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. In this paper, we selectively explore aspects of data growth that are linked to everyday practices and the way they draw upon and generate Internet data. We suggest that such growth does have some conceivable limits. However, the nature of 'Internet use' is changing and forms of growth are emerging that are more disconnected from human activity and time-use. This suggests that although there may well be limits, in principle, to some forms of growth, total data traffic seems likely to continue growing. This calls for careful attention to the nature of the trends involved, as a basis for intentionally building limits into this system before levels of Internet electricity demand becomes directly and more explicitly problematic.
The progress of technological development and the resulting rapid replacement of end-user devices has brought increasing issues of electronics waste upon our society. Interaction designers and researchers within the field of human-computer interaction have begun to tackle issues of environmental sustainability in recent years, including the problem of obsolescence. By considering the experiential aspects of obsolescence and the ways in which interaction design could have an impact on experience, the field presents promising approaches with potential to contribute to and complement current materials-focused solutions. In this chapter, we report on a survey of sustainable human-computer interaction research that investigates or addresses issues of obsolescence, presenting challenges as well as opportunities for interaction designers to contribute to solving these issues.
This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best, expected, and worst, are set up, which include annual numbers of sold devices, data traffic and electricity intensities/efficiencies. The most significant trend, regardless of scenario, is that the proportion of use-stage electricity by consumer devices will decrease and will be transferred to the networks and data centers. Still, it seems like wireless access networks will not be the main driver for electricity use. The analysis shows that for the worst-case scenario, CT could use as much as 51% of global electricity in 2030. This will happen if not enough improvement in electricity efficiency of wireless access networks and fixed access networks/data centers is possible. However, until 2030, globally-generated renewable electricity is likely to exceed the electricity demand of all networks and data centers. Nevertheless, the present investigation suggests, for the worst-case scenario, that CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.
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 little-explored challenge for sustainable HCI and discuss ideas for (re)designing around the principle of ‘light-weight’ data ‘needs’.
Sustainability research about using Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to reduce household energy consumption has recently focused on two potential strategies: "smart homes" that rely on sensors and technological innovations to automatically reduce the energy load, and tools that seek to persuade users to change their domestic habits, such as by using eco-feedback devices to raise awareness of the amount of energy used. We propose that there is another approach: support and encouragement of existing best practice within a community to spread it more widely. One such practice is household retrofitting: the installation of domestic environmental technologies (DETs) such as increased insulation, energy efficient boilers, or renewable energy that serve to permanently reduce energy use in a household. We have developed a smartphone application to be used in conjunction with retrofitting open-home events that assists organizers in tracking their event's impact, whilst also helping users in the decision-making processes that surround retrofitting. This paper provides an overview of the app development process and initial results from in-the-wild testing, whilst also identifying potential areas for future research.
This paper challenges the sustainable HCI community to move away from a focus on demand and instead address climate change as a supply problem. We identify a new route to impact, namely addressing the psychological barriers that interfere with political mobilization toward limiting the use of fossil fuels. Five barriers are explored as a means of re-focusing research objectives for the community.
We propose a framework for assessing the sustainability of interactive technologies. Our goal is to initiate steps towards a common standard of measurement for sustainability in the HCI community. This could help motivate green competition, raise consumer awareness, and acknowledge environmental leadership. In this paper we summarize our methodology, our results, and discuss how the framework can be integrated for testing within the HCI community.
To date, research in sustainable HCI has dealt with ecofeedback, usage and recycling of appliances within the home, and longevity of portable electronics such as mobile phones. However, there seems to be less awareness of the energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of domestic consumer electronics and information technology. Such awareness is needed to inform HCI sustainability researchers on how best to prioritise efforts around digital media and IT. Grounded in inventories, interview and plug energy data from 33 undergraduate student participants, our findings provide the context for assessing approaches to reducing the energy and carbon emissions of media and IT in the home. In the paper, we use the findings to discuss and inform more fruitful directions that sustainable HCI research might take, and we quantify how various strategies might have modified the energy and emissions impacts for our participants.
Recent years have seen a flurry of work on sustainable com- puting and sustainable HCI, but it is unclear whether this body of work adheres to a meaningful definition of sustain- ability. In this paper, we review four interlocking frameworks that together provide a rigorous foundation for what consti- tutes sustainability. Each consecutive framework both builds upon and can loosely be seen as a refinement of the previous framework. More specifically, we leverage prominent eco- logical thinking from outside of computer science to inform what sustainability means in the context of computing. To this end, we re-evaluate some recent results from the field of sustainable HCI and offer thoughts on further research in the field.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that roughly 125 million mobile phones are discarded into landfills each year, illustrating the unequivocal connection between a successful pervasive computing technology and a looming environmental crisis. Extensive research has revealed the material dangers and toxic effects of mobile phone disposal, and programs and regulations that encourage or mandate mobile phone donation and recycling. Options to reduce such waste include recycling through electronics recycling programs, reuse of phones through reselling, phone giveaways, donation of phones to organizations that collect and distribute phones for reuse. The difference in phone usage among the various regions might explain in part why data privacy and transfer were such strong concerns among the Japanese participants and it played such an influential role in decision-making surrounding end-of-life mobile phone practices.
We propose a new radio resource management algorithm which aims at minimizing
the base station supply power consumption for multi-user MIMO-OFDM. Given a
base station power model that establishes a relation between the RF transmit
power and the supply power consumption, the algorithm optimizes the trade-off
between three basic power-saving mechanisms: antenna adaptation, power control
and discontinuous transmission. The algorithm comprises two steps: a) the first
step estimates sleep mode duration, resource shares and antenna configuration
based on average channel conditions and b) the second step exploits
instantaneous channel knowledge at the transmitter for frequency selective
time-variant channels. The proposed algorithm finds the number of transmit
antennas, the RF transmission power per resource unit and spatial channel, the
number of discontinuous transmission time slots, and the multi-user resource
allocation, such that supply power consumption is minimized. Simulation results
indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of reducing the supply power
consumption by between 25% and 40%, dependend on the system load.
In four university student kitchens over twenty-one days, we captured participants' food preparation activity, quantified the greenhouse gas emissions and direct energy connected to the food and cooking, and talked to participants about their food practices. Grounded in this uniquely detailed micro-account, our findings inform sustainable design for cooking and eating at home and quantify the potential impacts. We outline the relation of the impacts to our participants' approaches to everyday food preparation, the organisation of their time, and the role of social meals. Our technique allows evaluation of opportunities for sustainable intervention design: at the appliance, in the digitally-mediated organisation of meals and inventory management, and more broadly in reflecting upon and reshaping diet.
Community activist groups typically rely on core groups of highly motivated members. In this paper we consider how crowdsourcing strategies can be used to supplement the activities of pro-environmental community activists, thus increasing the scalability of their campaigns. We focus on mobile data collection applications and strategies that can be used to engage casual participants in pro-environmental data collection. We report the results of a study that used both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the impact of different motivational factors and strategies, including both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. The study compared and provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of two extrinsic motivation strategies, pointification – a subset of gamification – and financial incentives. Prior environmental interest is also assessed as an intrinsic motivation factor. In contrast to previous HCI research on pro-environmental technology, much of which has focused on individual behavior change, this paper offers new insights and recommendations on the design of systems that target groups and communities.
In this paper, we report our findings on the adoption practices of used personal digital assistants (PDAs) to inform reuse of outdated computing products. Our interviews with 12 eBay users who bought used PDAs showed a variety of ways in which users indirectly supported sustainability. This allowed us to re-examine sustainability as something that is dynamically and arbitrarily shaped by the users and not just dependent on the sustainable feature of the product. We end with design implications for supporting users' shaping of sustainability.
This paper describes the design and interprets the results of a survey of 435 undergraduate students concerning the attitudes of this mainly millennial population towards sustainability apropos of the material effects of information technologies. This survey follows from earlier work on notions of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID)—that is the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus within HCI. In so doing it advances to some degree the empirical resources needed to scaffold an understanding of the theory and principles of SID. The interpretations offered yield key insights about understanding different notions of what it means to be successful in a material sense to this population and specific design principles for creating interactive designs differently such that more sustainable behaviors are palatable to individuals of varying attitudes.
This paper takes up the problem of understanding why we preserve some things passionately and discard others without thought. We briefly report on the theoretical literature relating to this question, both in terms of existing literature in HCI, as well as in terms of related literatures that can advance the understanding for the HCI community. We use this reading to refine our frameworks for understanding durability in digital artifice as an issue of sustainable interaction design in HCI. Next, we report in detail on our ongoing work in collecting personal inventories of digital artifice in the home context. We relate our prior and most current personal inventories collections to the framework that owes to our reading of the theoretical literature. Finally, we summarize the theoretical implications and findings of our personal inventories work in terms of implications for the design of digital artifice in a manner that is more durable.
Eco-feedback technology provides feedback on individual or group behaviors with a goal of reducing environmental impact. The history of eco-feedback extends back more than 40 years to the origins of environmental psychology. Despite its stated purpose, few HCI eco-feedback studies have attempted to measure behavior change. This leads to two overarching questions: (1) what can HCI learn from environmental psychology and (2) what role should HCI have in designing and evaluating eco-feedback technology? To help answer these questions, this paper conducts a comparative survey of eco-feedback technology, including 89 papers from environmental psychology and 44 papers from the HCI and UbiComp literature. We also provide an overview of predominant models of proenvironmental behaviors and a summary of key motivation techniques to promote this behavior.
The greatest contributor of CO2 emissions in the average American household is personal transportation. Because transportation is inherently a mobile activity, mobile devices are well suited to sense and provide feedback about these activities. In this paper, we explore the use of personal ambient displays on mobile phones to give users feedback about sensed and self-reported transportation behaviors. We first present results from a set of formative studies exploring our respondents' existing transportation routines, willingness to engage in and maintain green transportation behavior, and reactions to early mobile phone "green" application design concepts. We then describe the results of a 3-week field study (N=13) of the UbiGreen Transportation Display prototype, a mobile phone application that semi-automatically senses and reveals information about transportation behavior. Our contributions include a working system for semi-automatically tracking transit activity, a visual design capable of engaging users in the goal of increasing green transportation, and the results of our studies, which have implications for the design of future green applications.
By its nature, the discipline of human computer interaction must take into consideration the issues that are most pertinent to humans. We believe that the CHI community faces an unanswered challenge in the creation of interactive systems: sustainability. For example, climate scientists argue that the most serious consequences of climate change can be averted, but only if fundamental changes are made. The goal of this SIG is to raise awareness of these issues in the CHI community and to start a conversation about the possibilities and responsibilities we have to address issues of sustainability.
This paper presents the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus of interaction design—a perspective that is termed Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). As a starting point for a perspective of sustainability, design is defined as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being. This perspective of sustainability is presented in terms of design values, methods, and reasoning. The paper proposes (i) a rubric for understanding the material effects of particular interaction design cases in terms of forms of use, reuse, and disposal, and (ii) several principles to guide SID. The paper illustrates—with particular examples of design critique for interactive products and appeals to secondary research—how two of these principles may be applied to move the effects of designs from less preferred forms of use to more preferred ones. Finally, a vision for incorporating sustainability into the research and practice of interaction design is described. Author Keywords
Toyama [19] has proposed a "preliminary taxonomy" for classifying computing projects as a way of separating sustainable computing efforts from unsustainable ones. In this paper we explore the feasibility of Toyama's taxonomy. We begin by describing how we revised and developed his taxonomy to make it more practically useful and then conducted a pilot study where we used the revised version to evaluate four computing projects. The pilot study was then used as a foundation for further discussing and developing the revised taxonomy into yet another, third and final version which we have chosen to call the Sustainable Computing Evaluation Framework (SCEF). While our proposed framework (SCEF) is more practically useful than Toyama's "preliminary taxonomy", there are still challenges that need to be addressed and we end the paper by suggesting where future efforts could be focused.
There has been an increased interest in broader contexts from ecology and economics within the HCI community in recent years. These developments suggest that the HCI community should engage with and respond to concerns that are external to computing yet profoundly impact human society. In this paper we observe that taking these broader contexts into account yields a fundamentally different way to think about sustainable interaction design, one in which the designer's focus must be on a) ecological limits, b) creating designs and artifacts that do not further a cornucopian paradigm, and c) fundamental human needs.
It can be hard to be responsive to these contexts in practical HCI work. To address this, we propose that the design rubric of disintermediation can serve as a unifying approach for work that aims to meet the ecological and economic challenges outlined in the literature. After discussing the potential use and impact of disintermedation, we perform an analysis using this design rubric to several key application areas.
This paper looks at the activities of environmentally minded technology designers and provides an account of how these designers think, behave and differ. In contrast to traditional designers, green designers appear to: (1) Bias decisions (2) Design from a deep, personal ethos; (3) Accept 'not knowing' as a part of the design process; (4) Rely on alternative ways of knowing, and; (5) Shift roles as needed throughout the design process. While a superficial treatment of these differences might seem to disenfranchise green designers, we show that an analysis of green design as a discursive practice highlights how, through engagement with others, green design can enhance pro-environmental dialog and enact meaningful change.
Interactive devices and the services they support are reliant on the cloud and the digital infrastructure supporting it. The environmental impacts of this infrastructure are substantial and for particular services the infrastructure can account for up to 85% of the total impact. In this paper, we apply the principles of Sustainable Interaction Design to cloud services use of the digital infrastructure. We perform a critical analysis of current design practice with regard to interactive services, which we identify as the cornucopian paradigm. We show how user-centered design principles induce environmental impacts in different ways, and combine with technical and business drivers to drive growth of the infrastructure through a reinforcing feedback cycle. We then create a design rubric, substantially extending that of Blevis [6], to cover impacts of the digital infrastructure. In doing so, we engage in design criticism, identifying examples (both actual and potential) of good and bad practice. We then extend this rubric beyond an eco-efficiency paradigm to consider deeper and more radical perspectives on sustainability, and finish with future directions for exploration.
Despite significant progress in sustainable HCI towards theoretical frameworks to guide design, there is a gap between theory and practice, so that the impact of such frameworks is limited. As an initial exploration in bridging the theory-practice gap, we conducted a study using one well-established design framework, the Attachment Framework, to evaluate its applicability in use. We conducted a comparative study with 14 designers to explore the effect of the Attachment Framework on design, and evaluated their designs with 10 design experts using a set of six design criteria. Our results indicated a positive effect on the criterion of novelty, with mixed effects on attachment, presentation, aesthetics, usefulness, and feasibility. We contribute a set of challenges in the application of design frameworks to practice and offer a critical reflection on how researchers can more effectively communicate sustainable HCI design frameworks to practitioners.
With more and more activities taking place online, concern over the environmental impact of digital services has drawn attention to the energy intensity of the network. Estimating the network energy intensity has been the subject of research for some time but results have differed widely, thus weakening the robustness of any conclusions drawn from assessments. A review of past studies shows two separate communities at work, applying different methods and assumptions. In this article we consider the approaches of top-down and bottom-up modeling. Top-down models have in the past usually given higher estimates of energy intensity than bottom-up models. We find that among the main reasons for the difference are varying system boundaries, and assumptions on the number and energy efficiency of routers and optical transmission equipment. Through application of consistent system boundaries around the metro and core networks and excluding access networks and customer equipment, we reduce the difference between the energy intensity estimates of the alternative approaches. Additionally, we review the varying assumptions in existing bottom-up models and combine them in a meta-model. Through Monte Carlo simulation over the distributions behind the varying assumptions we provide a more robust estimate of approximate energy efficiency for networks of 0.02 kWh/Gbyte that can be used in the environmental impact assessment of digital services.
bit associated with real-world communication networking. We highlight the key real-world network deployment issues, particularly legacy systems and utilization, which can have a strong bearing on the level of energy efficiency. We show how and why the real-world metric values differ from prior models of network energy use. We show how including embodied energy leads to the overall environmental impact being minimized only when legacy systems are maintained. We capture the full end to end impact of networking including an understanding of the data centre and home equipment. An accurate understanding is needed if claims around the potential carbon benefit of communications technologies are to be substantiated.
Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice.
The use of information and communication technology and the web-based products it provides is responsible for significant emissions of greenhouse gases. In order to enable the reduction of emissions during the design of such products, it is necessary to estimate as accurately as possible their carbon impact over the
entire product system. In this work we describe a new method which combines models of energy consumption during the use of digital media with models of the behavior of the audience. We apply this method to conduct an assessment of the annual carbon emissions for the product suite of a major international news
organization. We then demonstrate its use for green design by evaluating the impacts of five different interventions on the product suite. We find that carbon footprint of the online newspaper amounts to approximately 7600 tCO2e per year, of which 75% are caused by the user devices. Among the evaluated scenarios a significant uptake of eReaders in favor of PCs has the greatest
In this study, we use an improved, more accurate model to analyze the energy footprint of content downloaded from a major online newspaper by means of various combinations of user devices and access networks. Our results indicate that previous analyses based on average figures for laptops or desktop personal computers predict national and global energy consumption values that are unrealistically high. Additionally, we identify the components that contribute most of the total energy consumption during the use stage of the life cycle of digital services. We find that, depending on the type of user device and access network employed, the data center where the news content originates consumes between 4% and 48% of the total energy consumption when news articles are read and between 2% and 11% when video content is viewed. Similarly, we find that user devices consume between 7% and 90% and 0.7% and 78% for articles and video content, respectively, depending on the type of user device and access network that is employed. Though increasing awareness of the energy consumption by data centers is justified, an analysis of our results shows that for individual users of the online newspaper we studied, energy use by user devices and the third-generation (3G) mobile network are usually bigger contributors to the service footprint than the datacenters. Analysis of our results also shows that data transfer of video content has a significant energy use on the 3G mobile network, but less so elsewhere. Hence, a strategy of reducing the resolution of video would reduce the energy footprint for individual users who are using mobile devices to access content by the 3G network.
In order to accurately assess the impact of geographical location on the energy footprint of digital media requires energy usage models of the Internet that take into account the geographic distance between both users and data providers. In this paper, we present the first such model to do this. Given the specific location of a data source and a user, we use traceroute data to estimate the number and type of network devices involved in data transmission. We then calculate the energy required to transmit the data, combined with energy consumption and utilization data compiled from a number of sources including both academic publications and industry datasheets. Significant quantities of online data are now served by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which cache multiple copies of content in locations around the world. We find that CDNs whose primary role is to speed up delivery to the end user also reduce the energy footprint of the network.
The impacts of information and communications technology (ICT) on the environment have been a rich area for research in recent years. A prime example is the continuing rise of digital music delivery, which has obvious potential for reducing the energy and environmental impacts of producing and delivering music to final consumers. This study assesses the energy and carbon dioxide (CO) emissions associated with several alternative methods for delivering one album of music to a final customer, either through traditional retail or e-commerce sales of compact discs or through a digital download service. We analyze a set of six (three compact disc and three digital download) scenarios for the delivery of one music album from the recording stage to the consumer's home in either CD or digital form. We find that despite the increased energy and emissions associated with Internet data flows, purchasing music digitally reduces the energy and carbon dioxide (CO) emissions associated with delivering music to customers by between 40% and 80% from the best-case physical CD delivery, depending on whether a customer then burns the files to CD. Despite the dominance of the digital music delivery method, however, there are scenarios by which digital music performs less well, and these scenarios are explored. We suggest future areas of research, including alternative digital media services, such as subscription and streaming systems, for which Internet energy usage may be larger than for direct downloads.
We present an analysis of the potential worldwide demand for downloaded data and the resulting energy requirements of the cloud. Assuming that the average westerner's media consumption moves fully online but does not rise substantially beyond current levels, and the global middle class reach western levels of consumption, we estimate the overall demand to be 3200 MB/day per person, totaling 2570 Exabytes per year by the world population. We estimate the current energy demand for bandwidth to be 4 Wh/MB, based on two independent sources of data. We conclude that the average power required to support this activity would be 1175 GW at current levels of efficiency, and that a factor 60 performance improvement would be needed if infrastructure energy is to be provided by 1% of renewable energy capacity in 2030. By looking at historical trends in energy efficiency, we observe that this would be reached around 2021 if these trends continue. We document potential new applications that might require bandwidth capacity beyond our estimate. We also outline behavior change strategies that could be used to reduce the overall demand for bandwidth if historical performance improvements are not maintained, and as interim measures prior to efficiencies being realized.
We present a qualitative study of mobile phone ownership, replacement and disposal practices geared towards identifying design opportunities towards sustainable mobile phone interfaces. Our work investigates how people understand the lifespan of their phones, what factors, such as style, service contracts, and functionality, affect how they attribute value to their phones, and their awareness and actions regarding mobile phone sustainability. Our findings reveal the complexity of the actions and decision-making processes involved in phone ownership and replacement. We use these findings to present open areas for sustainable interaction design and generate seed ideas for designs and services to provoke thought and further exploration towards more sustainable mobile phone interfaces and practices. Author Keywords
We are developing evaluation tools that help sustainable HCI researchers to contribute to the overall project of achieving sustainability. In this paper we argue for the importance of broadening sustainable HCI evaluation beyond traditional HCI evaluation. We note the widespread phenomenon of unintended environmental consequences, largely overlooked thus far in sustainable HCI evaluation. We discuss three categories of tools - principles, heuristics, and indices - that could facilitate evaluation of sustainable HCI projects, mainly by operationalizing definitions of sustainability. We suggest that sustainable HCI research could become more relevant by developing evaluations that link to understandings of sustainability beyond HCI, and more 'scientific' by developing more systematic evaluations, while acknowledging that many ways of knowing play important roles in both sustainability and HCI. Our next steps include developing these tools for sustainable HCI evaluation and applying them to published research.
With the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. Here, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate.