The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Hitting the triple bottom line: widening the HCI approach to sustainability

Sustainable Development (SD) in its dimensions – environment, economy, and society – is a growing area of concern within the HCI community. This paper advances a systematic literature review on sustainability across the Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) body of work. The papers were classified according to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework to understand how the pillars of SD play into the HCI discourse on sustainability. The economic angle was identified as a gap in SHCI literature. To meet the TBL of SD, however, a balance needs to be sought across all ‘lines’. In this paper, we propose that HCI can advance the discussion and the understanding of the economic concepts around sustainability through taking a sociology perspective on the economic angle of the TBL. We sustain this claim by discussing economic concepts and the role that digital can play in redefining the established foundations of our economic system

Introduction to This Special Issue on Open Design at the Intersection of Making and Manufacturing

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered

Designing with the more-than-human:Temporalities of thinking with care

This one-day workshop brings together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to engage with more-than-human temporalities in the context of designing with care. We invite participants to experiment and think with more-than-human time experiences as a starting point to integrate emergent methodologies and practices for more-than-human discourses in design. By using living and once-living media (e.g., fungi, plant and insect specimens, biodesigned artefacts) as starting points for investigating more-than-human temporalities, participants will discuss how a pluralistic temporal approach can offer to the discourse of designing-with nonhuman entities, and how this aligns with emerging HCI research trajectories and concerns

Human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D):the Southern African landscape

Human-Computer interaction for development (HCI4D) research aims to maximise the usability of interfaces for interacting with technologies designed specifically for under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented populations. In this paper we provide a snapshot of the Southern African HCI4D research against the background of the global HCI4D research landscape.We commenced with a systematic literature review of HCI4D (2010-2017) then surveyed Southern African researchers working in the area. The contribution is to highlight the context- specific themes and challenges that emerged from our investigation

Gender inclusiveness in the adoption and use of home energy technologies

Home energy technologies, such as smart home energy management systems (SHEMS), are important in reducing energy-related emissions and empowering energy users. However, there are concerns on gender inclusiveness of the adoption and use of SHEMS. So far, information systems research has failed to address this significant challenge. This study examines factors shaping gendered adoption and use of smart home technologies, particularly SHEMS, and the implications this has for sustainability and energy equality. Applying a critical lens, we examine findings from a sensory ethnographic study on the adoption of SHEMS in households. The findings underline the need for more inclusive energy technology design, more understanding of diversity of households and more variety in the approaches for increasing awareness on and facilitating the adoption of energy technologies. We contribute to research on gender and home energy technologies, and to the larger discussion of gender and energy.© 2023 the Authors. This material is brought to you by the ECIS 2023 Proceedings at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in ECIS 2023 Research Papers by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected]=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

HCI as a means to prosociality in the economy

HCI research often involves intervening in the economic lives of people, but researchers only rarely give explicit consideration to what actually constitutes prosociality in the economy. Much has been said previously regarding sustainability but this has largely focused on environmental rather than interpersonal relations. This paper provides an analysis of how prosocial HCI has been discussed and continues to be defined as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we describe a variety of genres of work relating to prosocial HCI. Key intellectual differences are explored, including the epistemological and ethical positions involved in designing for prosocial outcomes as well as how HCI researchers posit economic decision-making. Finally, emerging issues and opportunities for further debate and collaboration are discussed in turn