ACM Interactions

Authors: Adrian Friday, Ann Light, Jason Tarl Jacques, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Kathrin Gerling, Robert Soden, Gözel Shakeri, Nicola J. Bidwell, Vishal Sharma, Neha Kumar
Posted: Mon, December 23, 2024 - 12:04:00

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There is no question that the impacts of climate change are being felt around the world: extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, record heat waves, forest fires, failing crops, the thinnest level of winter ice in the Antarctic. Yet, despite legally binding commitments to cut emissions and not meeting them being business-as-usual, global change has been disappointingly slow. The 1.5-degree goal, aimed at keeping the average global temperatures below potentially disastrous tipping points, has already been breached.

While sustainability as an area of research and activism is gaining attention at CHI, the premier conference on human-computer interaction, we argue that sustainability should have greater emphasis in HCI research and even become the main focus. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) writ large—as the tools and resources we use to create, store, share, transmit, and exchange information—was already in 2018 thought to account for global emissions as high as 2.1 to 3.9 percent (equivalent to global air travel), and these figures pre-date the current AI renaissance.  AI is already talked of as the most water- and energy-hungry of any ICT ever, to the point where some commentators have concluded it will be the last tool humans will be able to develop.

Of course, greenhouse gas emissions are just one of the many types of impact on people and the planet by the growth in ICT. Aside from impacts on end users and society through ICT adoption at scale, the full life cycle of ICT and its infrastructure is associated with neo-colonial and extractivist practices and pollution through e-waste handling and emissions.

HCI and ICT are intrinsically intertwined, so shouldn’t we, as a community of HCI and UX scholars and practitioners involved in designing technology futures, be more invested in putting sustainability at the heart of what we do?

A survey of SIGCHI members’ perspectives about ecological sustainability in early 2023 indicated that significant climate change shaped their views of participating in CHI ’23, especially given that the conference took place in Hawaii in 2024 and will take place in Japan in 2025 requiring almost everyone to fly. Thus, SIGCHI President Neha Kumar (with the support of the SIGCHI Sustainability Committee members, Nicola J. Bidwell and Vishal Sharma) created an opportunity for a panel discussion on this matter, in which we (the authors) participated.  Here, we summarize key elements of the discussion.

What role does HCI have in addressing climate change anyway? Or, more implicitly, what agency does HCI actually have in affecting climate change?
We argued that third-wave HCI is all about contextualized research with stakeholders addressing real-world needs.  As such, it’s hard to find any aspect of life that isn’t a topic of HCI or that lacks broader implications for how human and non-human actors interact and are affected by technology.  The panelists agreed that sustainability should be more broadly adopted as a research objective, or in the values and impacts implicated in HCI research: “shifting away from focusing just on metrics (e.g., h-index) to making sustainability the heart of the community; not taking sustainability as an afterthought but creating a culture of urgency.”

Creating new interactive experiences and engagements creates the technological infrastructure we adopt and depend upon. This has an environmental footprint and indirectly enables more or less sustainable ways of doing. Technology changes society, uses materials, draws energy, and shapes the dynamics between people and the planet, which also raises a core concern about the positioning of HCI research and how it does or doesn’t relate to sustainability.  Digital systems are neither neutral nor values-free [1]. Are we promulgating unsustainable technologies and, as some claim, optimizing or creating hedonistic yet unsustainable experiences by implication?  As Eli Blevis argued back in 2007, what is sustainability in design; and to what extent can we actually promote sustainability or more sustainable ways of doing through design [2]?

Digital Is Also Political; HCI Professionals Are Also Activists
While we might think of activism as taking to the streets in protest, there can be activism in the leadership we show in the research we choose to conduct or not conduct, and our practice in how we achieve and communicate it. We help create digital and digitally mediated worlds, and this is implicitly political [3].  What are the politics at work, and are we questioning these enough? What is our activist position? Can our activism challenge the capitalist infrastructures that are promoting unsustainability? A close yet rarely questioned relationship exists between the IT industry and IT research. Through sponsorship, employment, funding, and so on, such relationships are also a gateway for researchers to significant platforms, user bases, and datasets we might need. As such, are we implicated in accelerating growth in digital technologies that are changing the landscape of how decisions are made, opinions formed, politics executed, and the world viewed [4]?

ICT has more than one footprint. Extractivism, human rights issues, toxifying the environment through growing mountains of e-waste, often in the Global South. So, where is the right place to apply technology to help address this issue? What are we contributing and perpetuating through our designs, and could this be more sustainable? Do we question our broader academic practice? Where do we get our funding, and who underwrites our conferences?  As academic and practitioner role models, do we actually evoke sustainability through our designs and our actions? Is it defensible to have academic practice itself exploiting a growing number of ever larger academic in-person conferences [5], when parts of the world are already becoming uninhabitable due to climate change? How do we move away from a consumerist culture to a more planet-centric, post-human, post-growth (and giving people to care about more than “stuff”) culture?

As an example of this shift, we have seen that the relationship between our discipline and ethics has changed and evolved. What was once seen as a largely theoretical and mechanical science has given way to rich experiences as HCI has explored the boundary between machines, people, and, increasingly, the environment in which they operate. Today, the idea of not carrying out an ethical review for a proposed study involving humans would, at the least, raise eyebrows. As we move forward, HCI will need to reflect and contextualize itself as we explore the new challenges facing our planet and its inhabitants. But sustainability has a much broader remit. Our professional code of ethics already requires us to “avoid harm” and specifically notes that this includes harm to “the environment.” Perhaps in the future the lack of critical reflection—a sustainability review, if you will—will also be conspicuous if absent?

Where Can We Start?
We were asked directly: Is there a list of projects and what can we do? We can begin by reflecting on the sustainability of our work and how we conduct it by engaging with initiatives such as the SIGCHI special recognition for sustainable practices.

Beyond this, systemic change is needed. Uncertainties are uncomfortable, but we can make them into certainties, with a certain future for humanity and the planet, with collective participation. Can we do work that helps decision-making in this context? To begin, we can ask if our technology designs are centered on efficiency and optimization of what we currently do, rather than bringing about more radical change and collective action toward a more humane, sustainable, and just future for humans and more than humans alike.  As a community, we have already been looking at changing individuals’ behavior, but change at this scale is not going to address climate change: how we can be more transformative in and through our life and work?

In addressing systemic problems, we need to look to higher “leverage points,” as Meadows put it [6]. Sustainability in decision-making is usually complex, requires holistic and systemic viewpoints, and its impact often only makes sense in relation to the wider system. HCI is present in revealing this system in new ways and communicating with various stakeholders through data and software.  In our experience of working with decision makers, current frameworks and policies have not moved to more sustainable and systemic design approaches. There needs to be more agency, accountability, and above all, urgency in this kind of decision-making and leadership.

What about opinion forming, social movement, social and ecological solidarity? Sustainability is often grassroots, ad-hoc, and poorly supported, especially in digital terms. How might we use our indirect influence through technologies that are already changing the world and global discourse to affect this?

It's Critical We Recognize Our Full Agency 
Leveraging our academic privilege, we should reflect sustainability in our teaching and throughout our institutions in all aspects of our roles. We can’t afford to wait for future generations to take action, so how do we support rapid and collective action now? As much as academic practice and the processes we’ve established are not accustomed to being explicitly questioned—this is not just about the small yet still important issues of hybrid participation or whether or not to have conference merchandise—it's an existential question too: what does sustainable academia even look like?

Getting Involved
The impacts of a changing climate are neither distributed equally within society nor around the globe.  Rather than just designing yet more technologies for those who already benefit the most, we need to challenge this orthodoxy and address the more systemic issues in more inclusive ways drawing on other knowledges and approaches to sustainability [7]. CHI 2024 brought together an online panel to broaden the debate on this topic, foregrounding the perspectives of and challenges that HCI researchers from the Global South. We welcome such unheard voices and look forward to cocreating a more sustainable HCI practice, and indeed, a more sustainable world.

Endnotes
1. Brooks, I., Thorslund, M.L., Biørn-Hansen, A. Tech4bad in the oil and gas industry: Exploring choices for ICT professionals. Proc. of the 2023 International Conference on ICT for Sustainability. IEEE, New York, 142–153.
2. Blevis, E. Sustainable interaction design: Invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2007, 503–512.
3. Busse, D.K. et al. CHI at the barricades: An activist agenda? CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2013, 2407–2412.
4. Dourish, P. HCI and environmental sustainability: The politics of design and the design of politics. Proc. of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, New York, 2010, 1–10. 
5. Storme, T., Faulconbridge, J.R., Beaverstock, J.V., Derudder, B., and Witlox, F. Mobility and professional networks in academia: An exploration of the obligations of presence. Mobilities 12, 3 (2017), 405–424.
6. Meadows, D. Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. The Sustainability Institute, Vermont, 1999. 
7. Boll, S., Väänänen, K., Bidwell, N., Hassenzahl, M., and Neuhaus, R. A human-computer interaction perspective to drive change towards sustainable future (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 23092). Dagstuhl Reports 13, 2 (2023), 199–241.

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Posted in: on Mon, December 23, 2024 - 12:04:00

Adrian Friday

Ann Light

Jason Tarl Jacques

Matthew Louis Mauriello

Kathrin Gerling

Robert Soden

Gözel Shakeri

Nicola J. Bidwell

Vishal Sharma

Neha Kumar