Bran Knowles

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

HCI, Civic Engagement & Trust

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.

Exploring sustainability research in computing: where we are and where we go next

This paper develops a holistic framework of questions which seem to motivate sustainability research in computing in order to enable new opportunities for critique. Analysis of systematically selected corpora of computing publications demonstrates that several of these question areas are well covered, while others are ripe for further exploration. It also provides insight into which of these questions tend to be addressed by different communities within sustainable computing. The framework itself reveals discursive similarities between other existing environmental discourses, enabling reflection and participation with the broader sustainability debate. It is argued that the current computing discourse on sustainability is reformist and premised in a Triple Bottom Line construction of sustainability. A radical, Quadruple Bottom Line alternative is explored as a new vista for computing research.

Patterns of persuasion for sustainability

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.

Models and Patterns of Trust

As in all collaborative work, trust is a vital ingredient of successful computer supported cooperative work, yet there is little in the way of design principles to help practitioners develop systems that foster trust. To address this gap, we present a set of design patterns, based on our experience designing systems with the explicit intention of increasing trust between stakeholders. We contextualize these patterns by describing our own learning process, from the development, testing and refinement of a trust model, to our realization that the insights we gained along the way were most usefully expressed through design patterns. In addition to a set of patterns for trust, this paper seeks to demonstrate of the value of patterns as a means of communicating the nuances revealed through ethnographic investigation.

Trustworthy by design

Driven by changes in working practices and technology trends, organizations are increasingly reliant on mobile workers and the data they capture. However, while significant work has been carried out on increasing the usability of mobile devices and applications, little attention has been paid to the quality of data captured by mobile workers. If this data is inaccurate or untrustworthy, serious consequences can ensue. In this paper we study a system targeted at mobile workers in the highways sector that is deliberately designed to increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data collected. The resulting Inspections application has been very positively received by workers and we present lessons that we believe can be applied to other applications of this type.

A sustainable HCI knowledge base in progress

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

Is there a European strand of sustainable HCI

Sustainability has been an established topic at the main CHI conference since 2007. It has, however, not been an equally prominent theme at the NordiCHI conference. It is now time to establish Sustainable HCI as an important and prominent topic also at NordiCHI.

Designing a Mobile Service as a Facilitator for Capturing Local Trade Data

In this paper we will highlight the potential for creating alternative economic models based on ethical trading to encourage communities to embrace the benefits of connecting, sharing and trading more locally. In particular the research presented considers whether mobile and ubiquitous computing can be used to effectively to support such an initiative as an alternative to local currency schemes. The current prototype known as BARTER encourages transparency in the dissemination of local trade information to all members of the community, including the customers, rather than adopting current approaches whereby the trader records such information without revealing anything to the customers. This transparency also allows us to illustrate to customers that the more money is spent locally the healthier the local economy becomes bringing benefits to all.

Visualising the flow of a local economy to encourage inter-community trading: adding bits to BARTER

In this research we present a visualisation to represent the flow of money between traders in the local economy. The aim is to use a rhetorical approach to persuasion such that it promotes inter-community local trading in such a way that it highlights community benefit over personal gain.