Exploring (un)sustainable growth of digital technologies in the home

HCI and Ubicomp research often centres around the support of humans interacting with digital technology. Despite this obvious focus, there seems to be less work on understanding how these digital technologies can lead to growth in use, dependence, and influence practices in everyday life. In this paper we discuss how digital technologies have been, and continue to be, adopted in domestic practices—and how the growth of interactions with various ecologies of digital technologies can lead to growth in use and energy consumption. We further the discussion within ICT4S and sustainable HCI on how to promote research that encourages sustainability as a core concern—socially, economically, and ecologically—emphasising that defining limits to growth are important when trying to affect change in sustainable directions. We echo calls for more significant sustainability research from HCI, and set out some avenues of design for moving in this direction.