About

Sustainable HCI (SHCI) has long focused on exploring how digital technologies raising awareness and fostering a more sustainable lifestyle among individuals can help tackle the environmental crisis. However, keen to make a difference, recent contributions in the CHI community are questioning and reframing the efficacy of leveraging the behavior of individual consumers to impact the environmental crisis and suggest SHCI a shift of focus. On the one hand, suggestions have been made to restrict the focus, tackling climate change as a priority rather than considering the whole spectrum of environmental issues and exploiting existing and consolidated HCI skill sets to tackle the crisis. On the other hand, scholars advocate for expanding the focus from individual consumers to policymakers and policy design to have an impact at a larger scale and considering new perspectives in the discourse on climate change by collaborating with a wider range of stakeholders, including non-human actors. Acknowledging the interconnections among different species challenges the existing anthropocentric and growthcentered perspectives.

This view calls for adopting a more-than-human approach to help SHCI researchers understand better the uneven impacts of the changing planet as it affects both human and non-human communities and extend their perspective on climate change risks by incorporating the value of biodiversity, other “non-market” assets and the experiences of communities already experiencing climate change first-hand. Understanding the climate change phenomenon (i.e., its causes, dynamics, and impacts) is the basis for action and implies dialoguing with other disciplines and democratizing data. Since most climate change discourse occurs outside HCI, HCI researchers are called to develop multidisciplinary competencies and work across disciplines to understand the phenomenon first and then make it understandable to citizens. As data and information technologies have the power to frame our understanding and responses to climate and sustainability challenges, the work of making data understandable should not come at the expense of understanding the complexity of the phenomena.

Finally, it is pivotal for HCI to make data not only understandable but also a trigger for individual and collective action, avoiding the current disconcerting and anxiety generating pictures of climate change in favor of a hope-full vision.