Robots are rapidly changing how we live and think about our future everyday lives. However, questions of sustainability rarely engage with the kinds of worlds successful robots enable and help to bring about. The potential to imagine more sustainable worlds for people, robots and other non-humans to inhabit is vast and largely untapped. In this talk I will demonstrate how the dominate ways we think about environmental sustainability and social inclusion in robotics is limiting the potential for more sustainable outcomes by narrowing the focus on inputs, outputs and causal relationships. I will showcase several projects informed by sociological and anthropologic research with Australian households and international colleagues that open up new possibilities for more sustainable everyday life. Focusing on the smart home and domestic robots-such as robotic vacuum cleaners and digital voice assistants-I will demonstrate how intentions for resource efficiency and sustainability are commonly subsumed by more resource intensive lifestyle visions that may lead to perverse outcomes. Drawing on these projects and their design ethnography methodologies, I will provide examples of other ways of researching and thinking with the future lifestyle visions associated with smart homes and robots to help realize alternative and more sustainable life worlds. These include exploring new aesthetic imaginaries for the environments where robots are intended to become (or already are) ubiquitous; paying attention to the practices in which robots are likely to become embedded; and designing research methods which enable current or potential household users to imagine alternative future relationships with robots.

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

In response to research concerns that smartphone usage negatively impacts intimate relationships, this paper presents a study exploring how design can encourage smartphone accountability in family home settings. We developed and deployed three provotypes with seven families via a Research through Design study intended to encourage reflections on ubiquitous and routinised smartphone usage. The provotypes progressively explore ways of making smartphone use visible by facilitating individualised accountability, competitive accountability, and collective accountability. We present insights into how these provotypes shaped family practices based on a qualitative study with 26 participants. We found that, by emphasising different forms of shared accountability, the provotypes reduced smartphone use, which in turn fostered family intimacy and togetherness, rooted in meanings of caring and sharing. Finally, we discuss our study’s implications for how provotypes can help explore forms of accountability in practices involving sustainable technology use within the home.

HCI research involving older adults has typically focused on improving technology skills, mobility and health outcomes. Technology for positive ageing emphasizing creativity, inquisitiveness and resourcefulness is less commonly explored. This article builds on this research to contribute an understanding of the importance of curiosity, play and experimentation in supporting positive wellbeing outcomes for older adults living with smart home devices. The research was conducted in regional Australia by an aged care provider and two universities. Twenty-three households participated in the interdisciplinary in-home ethnographic and technological smart device trial that included voice assistants, robotic vacuums, smart kettles and smart lights. The article discusses routines and interactions involving these devices, which resulted in wellbeing outcomes that built participants’ digital living skills. These findings inform concluding recommendations about how to design smart home devices, aged care programs and services involving emerging technologies, to support positive ageing.

Smartphones are important for international development in the Global South. This paper explores how access to smartphone technologies promote women's agency for social change in these contexts by creating learning and livelihood opportunities and increasing connection with local market and service providers. The paper presents findings from a project which provided 200 Bangladeshi rural women farmers with smartphone technologies, training and support, and qualitatively investigated their ability to cope with geographic vulnerabilities, challenging market access, and social barriers. Reporting on a subset of these women's experiences, smartphone technologies helped these women gain better access to public agricultural extension and financial services, along with better acceptance from family and society. This, in turn, improved their dignity, confidence and sense of wellbeing. Insights will help ICT4D designers and development practitioners understand the importance of low-cost, bottom-up design inputs and social factors in future projects in similar developing country contexts.

Sexual consent has undergone a transformation toward an “enthusiastic” feminist model that emphasizes consent as an ongoing and voluntary process of negotiation and affirmation. This paper considers how such a model can advance understandings of consent in HCI research and design in relation to embodied interactions with emerging technologies that also occur outside of sexual interactions. We apply the popular “FRIES” model of sexual consent (Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic and Specific) to three areas of embodied interaction: 1) bodily-play interactions, 2) persuasive interactions with smart technologies, and 3) intimate interactions with anthropomorphized devices. Based on erotic play practices, we contribute a “TEASE” process guideline (Traffic lights, Establish ongoing dialogue, Aftercare, Safewords, and Explicate soft/hard limits) to advance consensual practice in HCI and develop implementation scenarios.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) supports the creation of personalized, contextualized, and targeted content. However, the algorithms underpinning NLG have come under scrutiny for reinforcing gender, racial, and other problematic biases. Recent research in NLG seeks to remove these biases through principles of fairness and privacy. Drawing on gender and queer theories from sociology and Science and Technology studies, we consider how NLG can contribute towards the advancement of gender equity in society. We propose a conceptual framework and technical parameters for aligning NLG with feminist HCI qualities. We present three approaches: (1) adhering to current approaches of removing sensitive gender attributes, (2) steering gender differences away from the norm, and (3) queering gender by troubling stereotypes. We discuss the advantages and limitations of these approaches across three hypothetical scenarios; newspaper headlines, job advertisements, and chatbots. We conclude by discussing considerations for implementing this framework and related ethical and equity agendas.

Interest and uptake of smart home technologies has been lower than anticipated, particularly among women. Reporting on an academic-industry partnership, we present findings from an ethnographic study with 31 Australian smart home early adopters. The paper analyses these households' experiences in relation to three concepts central to Intel's ambient computing vision for the home: protection, productivity and pleasure, or 'the 3Ps'. We find that protection is a form of caregiving; productivity provides 'small conveniences', energy savings and multi-tasking possibilities; and pleasure is derived from ambient and aesthetic features, and the joy of 'playing around' with tech. Our analysis identifies three design challenges and opportunities for the smart home: internal threats to household protection; feminine desires for the smart home; and increased 'digital housekeeping'. We conclude by suggesting how HCI designers can and should respond to these gendered challenges.

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of hygge as a low-energy design vision for the smart home. Hygge is a Danish concept that embodies aesthetic experiences related to conviviality, often shaped by orchestrating atmospheres through low-level lighting. To explore this vision, we probe two Australian households that already live with smart home lighting technology. We report on household reflections of embedding hygge into everyday life. We conclude by outlining future directions for exploring desirable and sus¬tainable smart home visions.

Research has shown that desirable designs shape the use and experiences people have when interacting with technology. Nevertheless, how desirability influences energy consumption is often overlooked, particularly in HCI studies evaluating the sustainability benefits of smart home technology. In this paper, we present a qualitative study with 23 Australian households who reflect on their experiences of living with smart home devices. Drawing on Nelson and Stolterman's concept of desiderata we develop a typology of householders' desires for the smart home and their energy implications. We structure these desires as three smart home personas: the helper, optimiser and hedonist, which align with desiderata's three approaches to desire (reason, ethics and aesthetics). We use these insights to discuss how desirability can be used within HCI for steering design of the smart home towards sustainability.

Since Blevis's seminal paper [Blevis 2007] in 2007, environmental sustainability has established itself as a mainstream concern for HCI. After an initial flurry of excitement about the potential for existing HCI techniques, such as persuasive computing and interaction design, to contributemeaningfully to increasing sustainability, we have begun to recognize that the complexity and apparent intractability of working towards sustainability is providing serious challenges to current HCI ways of approaching problems. For example, some are working to deepen the engagement between HCI and established approaches of environmental psychology [Froehlich et al. 2010] and behavioral theory [Hekler et al. 2013] in order to develop more rigorous methods and theoretical connections for pursuing sustainability. Others are deploying and evaluating eco-feedback technologies at a scale not yet common in HCI [Erickson et al. 2013] to get a better sense of their effects and potentialities. Thus, sustainability is becoming not simply a problem that HCI can contribute to solving, but also an opportunity to understand the limits of HCI as it is currently constituted and to develop new possibilities for the discipline.

Eco-feedback systems currently frame householders as micro-resource managers, who weigh up the costs and benefits of their consumption, and make autonomous, rational and efficient decisions. Reporting on findings from a qualitative study of three Australian energy and water eco-feedback programs utilising an in-home display (IHD) system, this paper challenges this view. The research finds that householders consume energy and water to carry out everyday practices, such as showering, laundering and cooling, which are mediated by social, cultural, technical and institutional dynamics. The paper proposes an alternative design paradigm for eco-feedback systems premised on the realities of everyday life and identifies several design directions that emerge from this new starting point.