Visible - Actionable - Sustainable: Sustainable interaction design in professional domains

Abstract

The growing body of sustainable HCI shows that new interfaces may increase awareness and motivate action for environmental impact. Most of this research has been aimed at consumer decision-making, leaving out many professional domains. This workshop broadens the scope of HCI research to consider new user groups including professional users, educators, designers and engineers, governments and NGO's. We propose a broad approach to sustainable HCI for emerging domains: visible - actionable - sustainable. In order to effect sustainable change, new interfaces need to make issues visible in order to promote actionable decisions towards socially and environmentally sustainable ends. These approaches can support sustainable decision-making in product design and a variety of sectors. This workshop will gather interdisciplinary case studies to help identify emerging domains of where sustainable interaction design could provide important social and environmental benefit. The expected outcome is the start of a pattern language for sustainability solutions to the most promising application domains. Patterns are named solutions to recurring problems with enough flexibility to be applied in new contexts. Pattern languages have been developed for architecture and urban planning, object-oriented programming, change management, HCI, and pedagogy. We choose to structure the workshop around the concepts and techniques of pattern languages because because they focus the attention of the community on creating and sharing expertise on what works in general and in a form and format that is useful to designers who are working on specific solutions for specific contexts. The workshop will consider submissions to inform a pattern language from a number of potential application domains for sustainable interaction design including professional users, education, food and drink, marketing and sales, governments, NGOs, designers and engineers.