Vanessa Thomas

HCI and Environmental Public Policy: Opportunities for Engagement

This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary authors 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.

Collective Intelligence in Crises

New practices of social media use in emergency response seem to enable broader ‘situation awareness’ and new forms of crisis management. The scale and speed of innovation in this field engenders disruptive innovation or a reordering of social, political, economic practices of emergency response. By examining these dynamics with the concept of social collective intelligence, important opportunities and challenges can be examined. In this chapter we focus on socio-technical aspects of social collective intelligence in crises to discuss positive and negative frictions and avenues for innovation. Of particular interest are ways of bridging between collective intelligence in crises and official emergency response efforts.

Doing good in HCI: can we broaden our agenda?

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, Editor

The Limits of HCD: Reimagining the Anthropocentricity of ISO 9241-210

Human-centred design (HCD) is just that: human-centred. As we approach the limits of Earths biophysical systems, it no longer feels appropriate to place humans at the centre of design decisions. Yet HCD and its ISO---ISO-9241-210:2010---continue to be powerful and popular tools within many computing and design departments, as well as in their affiliated industries. These design approaches are perpetuating the trend of incremental improvements to the living standards of the already privileged and digitally connected whilst ignoring the broader environmental and socio-political effects of digital technologies. In this paper, we attempt to reimagine HCD and its ISO by drawing on fields and concepts such as sustainable interaction design (SID), animal-computer interaction (ACI), and object oriented ontology (OOO). Through this, we contribute a preliminary set of proposals about what needs to change with HCD and its ISO. We close by discussing the ISO development process and suggesting routes for environmentally concerned researchers to influence the evolution of HCDs ISO.

The Limits of Evaluating Sustainability

Designing technology with sustainability in mind is becoming more and more important, especially considering future scenarios of limited resources where the worlds 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.

Evaluation Beyond Usability: Validating Sustainable HCI Research

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.

Silent SIG: Reflection in Action at CHI

The organisers of this SIG wish to disrupt CHIs frenetic schedule by offering attendees time and space for collective silence and shared group reflection. Our aim in doing so is to put into action some of the theories and methods already being used in and by the HCI community-e.g. mindfulness [3], reflective design [10], and slow design [8]-and to acknowledge that our well-being is of the utmost importance, including throughout conferences. During this SIG, we will offer attendees two phases of activities: one centred around group silence, and another focused on openly sharing reflections about our experiences at CHI in small groups. Between these activities, attendees will have opportunities to chat with each other. We hope this will foster personal and collective resilience, and inspire creativity.

Lickable Cities: Lick Everything in Sight and on Site

Lickable Cities is a research project that responds to the recent and overwhelming abundance of non-calls for gustatory exploration of urban spaces. In this paper, we share experiences from nearly three years of nonrepresentational, absurdist, and impractical research. During that time, we licked hundreds of surfaces, infrastructures, and interfaces in cities around the world. We en-countered many challenges from thinking with, designing for, and interfacing through taste, including: - how can and should we grapple with contamination?, and - how might lickable interfaces influence more-than-humans? We discuss these challenges to compassionately question the existing framework for designing with taste in HCI.

In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet, for just a moment, -

CHI can be a multisensory overload. Attendees endure days of workshops, presentations, evening parties, and ephemeral interactions. This paper attempts to disrupt that onslaught of activities [9]. It draws inspiration from theories and methods already in HCI - e.g. mindfulness [1], reflective design [8], and slow design [4, 7] - to bring eight pages of silence to the conference. This is meant to disrupt CHIs busy schedule and help attendees foster resilience. In pursuit of these aims, the authors will use the time and pages offered by this paper to facilitate a group silence; quiet, for just a moment, in the midst of the hurricane that is CHI.

Championing environmental and social justice: embracing, embedding, and promoting broader notions of sustainability in 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. --- Roy Bendor, Editor