Creating sustainability through Smart City Projects

Smart Cities are a key mechanism for facilitating sustainability – be that in the use of resources (e.g. energy, water), the running of city infrastructure (e.g. transport) or in terms of social policy (e.g. politics). Using our experience of a Smart City project, MK:Smart, we describe what role citizen-led innovation could have in promoting long-term sustainable change. Beyond this we detail some of the barriers to success we have identified in the hope that design patterns might help us address these challenges

Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities.

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness

Doing Good in HCI:Can We Broaden Our Agenda?

Heatmap depicting DNA damage gene expression across treatment cohorts. Color bar indicates log-fold expression change compared to control tumors. (PDF 92 kb

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 world’s 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

Understanding and mitigating the impact of Internet demand in everyday life

Digital devices and online services are increasingly embedded within our everyday lives. The growth in usage of these technologies has implications for environmental sustainability due to the energy demand from the underlying Internet infrastructure (e.g. communication networks, data centres). Energy efficiencies in the infrastructure are important, but they are made inconsequential by the sheer growth in the demand for data. We need to transition users’ Internet-connected practices and adapt HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) design in less demanding and more sustainable directions. Yet it’s not clear what the most data demanding devices and online activities are in users’ lives, and how this demand can be intervened with most effectively through HCI design. In this thesis, the issue of Internet demand is explored—uncovering how it is embedded into digital devices, online services and users’ everyday practices. Specifically, I conduct a series of experiments to understand Internet demand on mobile devices and in the home, involving: a large-scale quantitative analysis of 398 mobile devices; and a mixed-methods study involving month-long home router logging and interviews with 20 participants (nine households). Through these studies, I provide an in-depth understanding of how digital activities in users’ lives augment Internet demand (particularly through the practice of watching), and outline the roles for the HCI community and broader stakeholders (policy makers, businesses) in curtailing this demand. I then juxtapose these formative studies with design workshops involving 13 participants; these discover how we can reduce Internet demand in ways that users may accept or even want. From this, I provide specific design recommendations for the HCI community aiming to alleviate the issue of Internet growth for concerns of sustainability, as well as holistically mitigate the negative impacts that digital devices and online services can create in users’ lives