Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice.

This paper develops a holistic framework of questions which seem to motivate sustainability research in computing in order to enable new opportunities for critique. Analysis of systematically selected corpora of computing publications demonstrates that several of these question areas are well covered, while others are ripe for further exploration. It also provides insight into which of these questions tend to be addressed by different communities within sustainable computing. The framework itself reveals discursive similarities between other existing environmental discourses, enabling reflection and participation with the broader sustainability debate. It is argued that the current computing discourse on sustainability is reformist and premised in a Triple Bottom Line construction of sustainability. A radical, Quadruple Bottom Line alternative is explored as a new vista for computing research.