What kind of relationships do people develop with the things they have at home? What is it that makes them keep and cherish certain things and discard others? And how is it possible to study these relationships in a way that could inform the design of sustainable interactive artifacts? The behaviors implicated in connecting sustainability to interaction design are diverse, particular, and individual. As such, we have considered various methods for untangling the complex nature of these behaviors. One of the main questions that prompts this inquiry and search for suitable methods is that of why we - most of us in industrialized contexts - prefer new things to old ones.

This article summarizes research we have been conducting that focuses on collecting individual personal inventories of objects and technologies that populate everyday life. The idea of personal inventories is to inform - and improve - interaction design practice as well as our knowledge of design in the context of sustainability.