Next Steps for Sustainable HCI

Six years after the workshop on “defining the role of HCI in the challenges of sustainability”[1], that role remains unclear. In 2010, DiSalvo, Sengers, and Brynjarsdóttir identified five distinct genres in sustainable HCI (SHCI). Between the genres, they found striking unintentional redundancy; significant but unexamined differences in assumptions, methods, and outputs; and little connection to sustainability work outside HCI [2]. Since 2010, SHCI has continued to grow, through, for example, accounts of everyday practices, rich connections to practice theory, discussion of “undesigning,” design fictions, calls to activism, and speculations on large-scale social collapse. But we have done little so far to explicitly address the conceptual inconsistences in the field.