Adrian K. Clear

Next steps for sustainable HCI

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. ---Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

Understanding adaptive thermal comfort: new directions for UbiComp

In many parts of the world, mechanical heating and cooling is used to regulate indoor climates, with the aim of maintaining a uniform temperature. Achieving this is energy-intensive, since large indoor spaces must be constantly heated or cooled, and the difference to the outdoor temperature is large. This paper starts from the premise that comfort is not delivered to us by the indoor environment, but is instead something that is pursued as a normal part of daily life, through a variety of means. Based on a detailed study of four university students over several months, we explore how Ubicomp technologies can help create a more sustainable reality where people are more active in pursuing and maintaining their thermal comfort, and environments are less tightly controlled and less energy-intensive, and we outline areas for future research in this domain.

Accounting for energy-reliant services within everyday life at home

Researchers in pervasive and ubiquitous computing have produced much work on new sensing technologies for disaggregating domestic resource consumption, and on designs for energy-centric interventions at home. In a departure from this, we employ a service-oriented approach, where we account for not only the amount of resources that specific appliances draw upon, but also how the associated services may be characterised in the context of everyday life. We undertook a formative study in four student flats over a twenty-day period, collecting data using interviews with eleven participants and over two hundred in-home sensors. Following an in-depth description of observations and findings from our study, we argue that our approach provides a more inclusive range of understandings of resources and everyday life than has been shown from energy-centric approaches.

Towards an holistic view of the energy and environmental impacts of domestic media and IT

To date, research in sustainable HCI has dealt with eco-feedback, 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.

On using temporal features to create more accurate human-activity classifiers

Through advances in sensing technology, a huge amount of data is available to context-aware applications. A major challenge is extracting features of this data that correlate to high-level human activities. Time, while being semantically rich and an essentially free source of information, has not received sufficient attention for this task. In this paper, we examine the potential for taking temporal features--inherent in human activities--into account when classifying them. Preliminary experiments using the PlaceLab dataset show that absolute time and temporal relationships between activities can improve the accuracy of activity classifiers.

Enhancing Personal Informatics Through Social Sensemaking

Personal informatics practices are increasingly common, with a range of consumer technologies available to support, largely individual, interactions with data (e.g., performance measurement and activity/health monitoring). In this paper, we explore the concept of social sensemaking. In contrast to high-level statistics, we posit that social networking and reciprocal sharing of fine-grained self-tracker data can provide valuable context for individuals in making sense of their data. We present the design of an online platform called Citizense Makers (CM), which facilitates group sharing, annotating and discussion of self-tracker data. In a field trial of CM, we explore design issues around willingness to share data reciprocally; the importance of familiarity between individuals; and understandings of common activities in contextualising ones own data.

Situvis: A Visual Tool for Modeling a User's Behaviour Patterns in a Pervasive Environment

One of the key challenges faced when developing context-aware pervasive systems is to capture the set of inputs that we want a system to adapt to. Arbitrarily specifying ranges of sensor values to respond to will lead to incompleteness of the specification, and may also result in conflicts, when multiple incompatible adaptations may be triggered by a single user action. We posit that the ideal approach combines the use of past traces of real, annotated context data with the ability for a system designer or user to go in and interactively modify the specification of the set of inputs a particular adaptation should be responsive to. We introduce Situvis, an interactive visualisation tool we have developed which assists users and developers of context-aware pervasive systems by visually representing the conditions that need to be present for a situation to be triggered in terms of the real-world context that is being recorded, and allows the user to visually inspect these properties, evaluate their correctness, and change them as required. This tool provides the means to understand the scope of any adaptation defined in the system, and intuitively resolve conflicts inherent in the specification.

I'd Want to Burn the Data or at Least Nobble the Numbers: Towards Data-mediated Building Management for Comfort and Energy Use

In this paper, we explore the role of pervasive environmental sensor data in workplace building management. Current interactions between management and workplace occupants are limited by the gap between experiences of (dis)comfort (i.e. individual preferences and perceptions) and the rigid objectivity of organisational policies and procedures such as static setpoint temperatures for indoor spaces. Our hypothesis is that pervasive sensor data that captures the indoor climate can provide an effective platform from which to more successfully communicate about comfort and energy use. Through a qualitative study with building managers and occupants, we show that while data does not necessarily resolve these tensions, it provides an engaging forum for a more inclusive building management process, and we outline directions for taking a more conversational approach in the design of comfort and energy-use interventions for the workplace.

Expanding the Boundaries: A SIGCHI HCI & Sustainability Workshop

Following a challenge issued to the Sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to broaden its boundaries to increase breadth and depth of impact [16] this workshop will explore 5 key questions to encourage SHCI research to play a broader role in tackling global sustainability issues and to support the societal change that this will require. Out of this, it will produce a map of existing and future research agendas, and a collaborative position statement. It will also provide an environment of support and challenge to allow individuals working in this research area to consider their personal practice and the difficulties (both practical and emotional) they may encounter.

Supporting Sustainable Food Shopping

Food contributes a surprisingly large portion of personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Could pervasive technologies help influence diet choices to reduce this? The authors offer insights for designers of pervasive technologies addressing food and the GHG impacts of diet.