Brandin Hanson Knowles

Rethinking plan A for sustainable HCI

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.

Re-imagining persuasion: designing for self-transcendence

The last few years have seen a flurry of persuasive technologies aiming to encourage pro-environmental behaviors. In this study, I critique the dominant means of persuasion by operationalizing and applying the lessons of a robust body of psychology research on values, specifically exploring the kinds of values accommodated by and appealed to with these technologies. Results indicate that these designs overwhelming appeal to Self-Enhancement values, the same strategic approach associated with historically unsuccessful environmental and social campaigns. This insight is used as a springboard for discussion about a radically different, and thus far untried strategy for addressing the challenge of sustainability within persuasive technology research and sustainable HCI more generally.

BARTER: promoting local spending behavior

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, there is renewed interest in strategies for ensuring the future economic success of nations in a globalized marketplace. One of the main ideas being championed by governments is to promote growth by encouraging local spending, although it is not clear how to motivate this behavioral shift. Local currency initiatives are increasingly popular, though due to certain practicalities are rarely successful in fostering long term and widespread change in spending behaviors. We report on the development of a persuasive system (BARTER) that leverages mobile and ubiquitous technology to overcome some of the limitations of local currencies, while also providing users with the insight needed to determine for themselves how local spending may benefit their community.

Barter: A Technology Strategy for Local Wealth Generation

Encouraging people to spend locally can revive languishing economies, but circulating alternative local currencies often fails. Mobile social networking might offer a way to circumvent that approachs problems by augmenting existing currencies with information on how the money flows.

The wisdom of older technology (non)users

Older adults consistently reject digital technology even when designed to be accessible and trustworthy.

Emerging Trust Implications of Data-Rich Systems

Pervasive technologies are enabling an increasingly data-rich world that is mediated through a broad spectrum of often highly interdependent systems. The data science surrounding these systems is rapidly transforming nearly every aspect of our lives. But how trustworthy are the systems and data upon which we have come to rely? This article explores the complex collaborations and interdependencies that mediate trust-formation and examines six challenges in generating and sustaining trust in the context of data-rich systems.

Mobile Age: Open Data Mobile Apps to Support Independent Living

We present design insights for developing mobile services for senior citizens which have emerged through substantive engagement with end users and other stakeholders. We describe the aims of the Mobile Age project, and the ideas and rationale for applications that have emerged through a co-creation process. A trusted data platform is proposed along with apps that bring open data and mobile technology to work for an underserved population.

This Changes Sustainable HCI

More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCIs 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 communitys 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 Kleins narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI.

Older Adults’ Deployment of ‘Distrust’

Older adults frequently deploy the concept of distrust when discussing digital technologies, and it is tempting to assume that distrust is largely responsible for the reduced uptake by older adults witnessed in the latest surveys of technology use. To help understand the impact of distrust on adoption behavior, we conducted focus groups with older adults exploring how, in what circumstances, and to what effect older adults articulate distrust in digital technologies. Our findings indicate that distrust is not especially relevant to older adults’ practical decision making around technology (non-)use. The older adults in our study used the language of distrust to open up discussions around digital technologies to larger issues related to values. This suggests that looking to distrust as a predictor of non-use (e.g., in Technology Acceptance Model studies) may be uniquely unhelpful in the case of older adults, as it narrows the discussion of technology acceptance and trust to interactional issues, when their use of distrust pertains to much wider concerns. Likewise, technology adoption should not be viewed as indicative of trust or an endorsement of technology acceptability. Older adults using-while-distrusting offers important insights into how to design truly acceptable digital technologies.