Growing and even excessive use of digital technology has unquestionably fuelled demand for digital devices and online services leading to a wide range of societal and environmental impacts. In sustainability terms, ICT as a whole is estimated to produce up to nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As presumed responsible innovators, the HCI community should now consider design strategies that will reduce use and demand for digital technology for the good of both its users and the planet—strategies perhaps even seen as retrogressive in an era where digital technology is constantly implicated in innovation and economic growth. Prior work has noted the potential to design “more moderate” interactions for sustainability, simultaneously addressing negative societal impacts on users’ wellbeing, relationships, productivity at work, and privacy. In this paper, we explore how we may design intentionally moderate digital interactions that retain our participants’ “more meaningful” experiences. We report on the outcomes of two design workshops to uncover experiences of meaningful device and service use, to inform practical designs for ‘moderate and meaningful’ interaction. From this, we offer design recommendations that aim to address the multiple negative impacts that digital technology can create, and discuss the possible barriers to these designs.

This paper reports on the first year of a three-year-long co-creation project with older adults. We focus our analysis on one particular workshop in which participants stopped designing and began to think about promoting the app we were co-creating. The workshop proved uniquely important for examining assumptions we had made about how and why the co-creation process would be successful. This paper concedes flaws in these assumptions and in the execution of the methodology as a way of illuminating dynamics that act on research projects in ways that are antithetical to effective co-creation. Reporting on the unexpected results of our participant engagements, we reveal new insights into the challenges in executing co-creation methodology.

Internet use and online services underpin everyday life, and the resultant energy demand is almost entirely hidden, yet significant and growing: it is anticipated to reach 21% of global electricity demand by 2030 and to eclipse half the greenhouse gas emissions of transportation by 2040. Driving this growth, real-time video streaming ('watching') is estimated at around 50% of all peak data traffic. Using a mixed-methods analysis of the use of 66 devices (e.g. smart TVs, tablets) across 20 participants in 9 households, we reveal the online activity of domestic watching and provide a detailed exploration of video-on-demand activities. We identify new ways in which watching is transitioning in more rather than less data demanding directions; and explore the role HCI may play in reducing this growing data demand. We further highlight implications for key HCI and societal stakeholders (policy makers, service providers, network engineers) to tackle this important issue.

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.

Road congestion, air pollution and sustainability are increasingly important in major cities. We look to understand how last-mile deliveries in the parcel sector are impacting our roads. Using formative field work and quantitative analysis of consignment manifests and location data, we identify how the effectiveness of life-style couriers is contributing to both environmental and non-environmental externalities. This paper presents an analysis of delivery performances and practices in last-mile logistics in central London, quantifying the impacts differing levels of experience have on overall round efficiency. We identify eleven key opportunities for technological support for last-mile parcel deliveries that could contribute to both driver effectiveness and sustainability. We finish by examining how HCI can lead to improved environmental and social justice by re-considering and realizing future collaborative visions in last-mile logistics.

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

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

Motivated by mobile devices' growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an account of how data demand has meaning and utility in our participants' social practices, and the timing and relative impacts of these. We then assess the scale of this demand by drawing comparison between our fine-grained observations and a more representative dataset of 398 devices from the Device Analyzer corpus. Our results highlight the significant categories of data demanding practice, and the identification of where changes in app time and duration of use might reduce or shift demand to reduce services' impacts.

This paper empirically explores the role that mobile devices have come to play in everyday practice, and how this links to demand for network connectivity and online services. After a preliminary device-logging period, thirteen participants were interviewed about how they use their iPhones or iPads. Our findings build a picture of how, through use of such devices, a variety of daily practices have come to depend upon a working data connection, which sometimes surges, but is at least always a trickle. This aims to inform the sustainable design of applications, services and infrastructures for smartphones and tablets. By focusing our analysis in this way, we highlight a little-explored challenge for sustainable HCI and discuss ideas for (re)designing around the principle of 'light-weight' data 'needs'.

To date, research in sustainable HCI has dealt with eco-feedback, usage and recycling of appliances within the home, and longevity of portable electronics such as mobile phones. However, there seems to be less awareness of the energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of domestic consumer electronics and information technology. Such awareness is needed to inform HCI sustainability researchers on how best to prioritise efforts around digital media and IT. Grounded in inventories, interview and plug energy data from 33 undergraduate student participants, our findings provide the context for assessing approaches to reducing the energy and carbon emissions of media and IT in the home. In the paper, we use the findings to discuss and inform more fruitful directions that sustainable HCI research might take, and we quantify how various strategies might have modified the energy and emissions impacts for our participants.

In four university student kitchens over twenty-one days, we captured participants' food preparation activity, quantified the greenhouse gas emissions and direct energy connected to the food and cooking, and talked to participants about their food practices. Grounded in this uniquely detailed micro-account, our findings inform sustainable design for cooking and eating at home and quantify the potential impacts. We outline the relation of the impacts to our participants' approaches to everyday food preparation, the organisation of their time, and the role of social meals. Our technique allows evaluation of opportunities for sustainable intervention design: at the appliance, in the digitally-mediated organisation of meals and inventory management, and more broadly in reflecting upon and reshaping diet.

In many parts of the world, mechanical heating and cooling is used to regulate indoor climates, with the aim of maintaining a uniform temperature. Achieving this is energy-intensive, since large indoor spaces must be constantly heated or cooled, and the difference to the outdoor temperature is large. This paper starts from the premise that comfort is not delivered to us by the indoor environment, but is instead something that is pursued as a normal part of daily life, through a variety of means. Based on a detailed study of four university students over several months, we explore how Ubicomp technologies can help create a more sustainable reality where people are more active in pursuing and maintaining their thermal comfort, and environments are less tightly controlled and less energy-intensive, and we outline areas for future research in this domain.