Eli Blevis

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 …

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 …

What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics—the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity. We sketch the design space of collapse informatics and a variety of example projects. We ask how notions of practice—theorized as collective activity in the “here and now”—can shift to the future since collapse has yet to occur.

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-visualizations (EVs) are any kind of interactive device targeted at revealing energy use in order to promote sustainable behaviours or foster positive attitudes towards sustainable practices. There are some interesting, informative, highly creative, and delightful EVs now available. This paper provides a critical survey of several noteworthy EVs and classifies them in terms of scale and contexts of use. The paper attempts to provide a foundation for practitioners to design new EVs in more varied scales and contexts and for researchers to continue to refine understandings of how effective EVs can be and how EVs can be made to be more effective. The paper describes (i) feedback types and use-contexts for classifying EVs and (ii) strategies for designing effective EVs.

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 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.

Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics---the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity---as a complement to ICT4D and mitigation-oriented sustainable HCI. We draw on a variety of literatures to offer a set of relevant concepts and articulate the relationships among them to orient and evaluate collapse informatics work. Observing that collapse informatics poses a unique class of …

Computer scientists have a role to play in combating global climate change. Global climate change is one of the most pressing problems of our time. Government agencies, universities, and businesses are starting to step up and invest in research, but even more change is needed, ranging from standards and policies to research innovations and new businesses.

This article addresses issues faced in the construction of computer programs that teach complex social skills. We describe a software architecture called Guided Social Simulation (GuSS). GuSS combines a simulation in which students can practice social skills with guidance that enhances the simulated experience. One of the applications of GuSS, called YELLO, teaches how to sell Yellow Pages advertising. YELLO is described in detail. The social simulation and guidance components of GuSS each present a set of technical and theoretical challenges. We discuss both sets. In discussing the techniques we use for constructing a social simulation, we emphasize the mechanisms that implement social agents as simple social planners. We then focus on one particular guidance component of GuSS—the storyteller. The storyteller is a teaching module that contains the real-life stories of experienced practitioners …

This paper describes our ongoing research about what it takes to design things that can be ensouled or can achieve heirloom status as a matter related to sustainable design. This paper draws on research on fifteen deep narratives that we collected to uncover detailed accounts of relationships between each participant and a single particular loved artifact or collection of a single type. Three themes emerged from our analysis of the narratives:(i) intimacy accumulated as an association with an object over time,(ii) investment of effort to learn and control functionality, and (iii) implicit values related to the patterns of collection of artifacts. In conceptualizing these three themes as an analytical frame, we arrived at two unifying notions that generally apply across many of the narratives and that serve as catalysts to design principles, namely the notion of rarity of an object, and the notion of aficionado-appeal of an object. We conclude by considering how these unifying notions can be used reflectively and judiciously to prompt design principles for interaction designers at least, and possibly as design principles in-and-of-themselves.

This paper considers the concept of ensoulment in relation to the design principle of promoting quality & equality within Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). The design-theoretic origins and implications are discussed and the background needed to understand this concept and principle are stated. Appropriate design research methods are discussed. Parts of a completed survey are described and initial findings from an ongoing elicitation study for collecting personal inventories is also presented. The implications of the survey and elicitation study for larger scale design research are described, with an eye towards future research.

Many contemporary approaches to environmental sustainability focus on the end-consumer. In this panel, we explore lessons from small food producers for future development of HCI as an agency of sustainable ways of being. We argue that attention to the relationship small producers have to the environment and their experiences of interrelations between environmental, economic, and social sustainability suggest new foundational issues for sustainable HCI research.

Fashion refers to the symbolic, aesthetic, and cultural meanings that objects carry, especially the ways in which people use objects to express their taste, lifestyle, social status and belonging to a community. Importantly, fashion can drive unsustainable consumption of digital technologies, as it can motivate the practice of discarding perfectly working devices in favor of newer ones without significant gains in utility. As a starting point, this paper considers a compelling idea concerning fashion and sustainable HCI: rather than attempt to thwart people’s propensity to want things for reasons of fashion or to exhort people not to engage in fashion-related practices, instead utilize a deeper understanding of the complexities of fashion to design interactive technology products and services using dimensions of fashion that are most compatible with sustainability. Our ultimate vision is to provide theoretical frameworks that allow human-centered computing designers to use fashion as a positive force for sustainable design. Towards this end, this paper first draws on a breadth of social theory to conceptualize fashion and its relationship to digital consumption and sustainability. Second, this paper presents a set of interviews with consumers to provide a deeper understanding of the role fashion in everyday IT consumption practices. From these interviews, we provide an inventory of design insights to serve as speculative design principles. We conclude by inviting designers and HCI researchers to think differently about the role of fashion which, given enough thoughtfulness, may actually serve as a potential catalyst to sustainability rather than to un-sustainability.

In Interdisciplinary Collaboration, edited by Derry, SJ, Schunn, CD, Gernsbacher, MA Mahwah, New Jersey: LEA, 2005. good thing. By ‘interdisciplinarity’is usually meant something like: the emergence of insight and understanding of a problem domain through the integration or derivation of different concepts, methods, and epistemologies from different disciplines in a novel way. However, it is also widely believed that ‘true’interdisciplinarity is very difficult to achieve and, more often than not, remains an elusive goal. In practice, many selfstyled interdisciplinary enterprises actually work at the level of being multidisciplinary (or pluridisciplinary): where a group of researchers from different disciplines cooperate by working together on the same problem towards a common goal, but continue to do so using theories, tools, and methods from their own discipline, and occasionally using the output from each other’s work. They remain, however, essentially within the boundaries of their own disciplines both in terms of their working practices and with respect to the outcomes of the work”[4].