As researchers and academics, we investigate our bad habitus—our everyday practices around technologies for research that reinforce dynamics of extraction, consumption, and waste—in relation to the lifecycle of technology in academic research. Through qualitative interviews, observation, and visual documentation, this case study explores the consideration of sustainability in purchasing decisions, use, maintenance, and disposal processes of digital devices used in a North American university as well the institution's related policies and procedures and faculty members’ practices. Through this research we find tensions that complicate sustainability in the university research context. We develop a rich description of the complexities of creating sustainable practices, policies, and procedures in a university setting as a step towards becoming more sustainable in our work and in our institutions, and we offer a set of recommendations for our academic institution and systems that both advance and thwart efforts to create sustainable practices.

This pictorial presents an ongoing collaboration between a Haida/Kwakwaka'wakw/Irish artist and a multi-disciplinary team of settler researchers around Sky Blanket, a hybrid Yeil Koowu (Raven's Tail) and Naaxiin (Chilkat) style woven robe. We elaborate on our collaborative commitments that include a focus on materiality and particular team dynamics. We report on three frictions we experienced while working on a TC2 jacquard loom: the translation of weaving patterns from one production technique to another, working within the material limitations of the loom, and the design of a woven box that allowed us to articulate differing perspectives on failures. In our discussion, we argue that these material encounters are a way for design and creation research to work through tensions at play between digital technologies, artistic practices, and cultural continuities.

Research at the intersection of technology and sustainability is increasing across disciplines. Virtual reality is one technology used to address social issues, though less work has explored how immersive environments might impact a viewer's impression of complex environmental issues like sustainability.

Many digital technologies, such as social media, community systems, and public displays, have been studied to explore how people engage with each other in their community. Yet little is known about how one form of technology, location-based games (LBGs), can support urban residents in community awareness, city exploration, and placemaking as they navigate spaces and places in their cities. To explore this topic, we investigated the challenges urban residents faced in finding information about their community along a transit network. We then designed, developed, and evaluated an LBG called City Explorer that supports city exploration using gamification and the viewing and sharing of community information. We found that residents valued the fun, competition, and rewards afforded through play in public spaces, creating opportunities for placemaking through location services and knowledge sharing. Players also wanted additional knowledge about their transit commutes, including data about the frequency and routines of their transit rides. Collectively, such ridership data offers potential for smart city initiatives and illustrates that careful design considerations are required to balance people’s needs for play, personal data, privacy, and community information acquisition.

Many working professionals commute via public transit, yet they have limited tools for learning about their urban neighborhoods and fellow commuters. We designed a location-based game called City Explorer to investigate how transit commuters capture, share, and view community information that is specifically tied to locations. Through a four-week field study, we found that participants valued the increased awareness of their personal travel routines that they gained through City Explorer. When viewing community information, they preferred information that was factual rather than opinion-based and was presented at the start and end of their commutes. Participants found less value in connecting with other transit riders because transit rides were often seen as opportunities to disengage from others. We discuss how location-based technologies can be designed to display factual community information before, during, and at the end of transit commutes.

This position paper approaches issues in the ethics of virtual reality particularly around notions of art as academic research, collaborative ethnographic media production, consent, and representation. These issues are explored through examples of research with the Yong community in Thailand, investigating the use of 360° video for cultural documentation and preservation. Possible ways of addressing some of the ethical issues in virtual reality are suggested, drawing upon collaborative ethnography, collaborative media production, and Value-Sensitive Design.

SCP in 360: Sustainable Production and Consumption in 360 Degrees [1] is a series of six 360° videos aiming to make sustainable production and consumption engaging, memorable, and relatable to a wider audience. Produced by the United Nations Environment Programme and researchers at Simon Fraser University, SCP in 360 takes viewers around the world to see the work of the One Planet Network on the ground, including projects on sustainable building in Nepal, community tourism in South Africa, consumer information in Chile, sustainable and healthy gastronomy in Costa Rica, circular procurement in the Netherlands, and low-carbon sustainable lifestyle initiatives in rural Armenia. For example, viewers visit organic vineyards and mushroom farms in Chile to learn about a project to inform Chilean citizens about the environmental and social impacts of everyday consumer products. Researchers at Simon Fraser University are using these videos to examine the use of new media technology and to investigate if viewers better understand concepts and values around sustainability or if they care more about sustainability after viewing such videos in a 360° environment. This research will explore if and how new immersive visual technologies might better communicate and transmit values and the importance of sustainability efforts.

In this paper, we highlight possibilities for designing intangible cultural values into interactions with technologies in heritage spaces. We do this specifically through the design of elwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible table installed in a cultural heritage museum. The tabletop was collaboratively designed to communicate complex and narrative information and values about Musqueam culture. Rather than focusing only on content and interface design, we wanted visitors to also experience Musqueam values through their interactions with the system. We describe our value-sensitive design process, present five interdependent design goals, discuss the design strategies that enabled us to meet these goals, and evaluate our approach through a user study. From our design process and evaluation we offer recommendations for designing values into interactions more generally and for tangible interactions specifically in ways that support visitors' experience and understanding of specific cultural values through technology.

Our pictorial visually describes ?elәwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible tabletop installed in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The tabletop was designed to communicate the continuity of Musqueam culture, convey the complexity of belongings that were excavated from Musqueam's ancient village site, and reconnect those belongings to traditional practices and oral histories through tangible interactions with the table-all while highlighting that cultural knowledge should be treated with respect. In this pictorial, we will show how the design process was shared among researchers, curators, and the exhibit Advisory Committee and highlight some of the key design decisions that came out of this collaboration.

Interactive digital technologies embedded in urban spaces typically tend to be used to deliver news, context-relevant information and commercial advertisements. To design urban technologies that will serve other ends, we first need to know how people might want to interact with them. Using an ethnographic approach, we collected field data in order to better understand this. This study presents some of the findings of our qualitative evaluation of MÉGAPHONE, an interactive artistic installation deployed in a public space in downtown Montréal, Canada. In this paper, we provide thick descriptions of our detailed field observations and interviews with participants conducted over the ten-week deployment with a deep focus on how users appropriated this system. Our results highlight four public interaction strategies as a set of abstractions that suggest how people might want to make use of interactive public installations: place-making, self-representing, first-person news reporting and bootstrapping online presence with digital recordings.

The next decade is likely to see a shift in digital public displays moving from non-interactive to interactive content. This will likely create a need for digital bulletin boards and for a better understanding of how such displays should be designed to encourage community members to interact with them. Our study addresses this by exploring community bulletin boards as a ubiquitous type of participatory non-digital display "in the wild". Our results highlight how they are used for content of local and contextual relevance, and how cultures of participation, personalization, location, the tangible character of architecture, access, control and flexibility might affect community members' level of engagement with them. Our analysis suggests entry points as design considerations intrinsically linked to the users' sense of agency within a delineated space. Overlaps with related work are identified throughout to provide further validation of previous findings in this area of research.

Much ICTD research for sub-Saharan Africa has focused on how technology related interventions have aimed to incorporate marginalized communities towards global economic growth. Our work builds on this. We present results from an exploratory qualitative study on the family communication practices of family members who communicate both within and between rural, suburban, and urban settings in Kenya. Our findings reveal that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, life advice, and everyday coordination of activities. We also outline social factors that affect family communication, including being an eldest child, having a widowed sibling, and having reduced access to technology because of gender, literacy, or one's financial situation. Lastly, we discuss new opportunities for technology design and articulate the challenges that designers will face if creating or deploying family communication technologies in Kenya.

The purpose of the present theoretical exploration is to lay the foundations of a platform-specific ontology of urban screens, which we define as an architectural scale media environment comprising two or more digital displays that can support interactive and/or artificial intelligence features. Still in its budding stages, this framework is intended to assist artists and HCI practitioners in the conception and evaluation of public space installations that heavily rely on digital displays. Using an architectural approach that analyzes urban screens in terms of medium specificity, this paper asks: "What are some of the key ontological attributes of urban screens as a computational medium?" We propose a taxonomy of five medium-specific properties articulated in relation to sensory modalities and modes of interaction. In providing an aesthetic, poetic, cognitive and experiential basis for understanding urban screens, this paper seeks to help researchers broadly consider their design parameters and generate new ideas.