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

DOI

10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.34How to use a DOI?

Keywords

practices; designing for sustainable directions; ecologies of devices; growth of domestic digital technologies

Abstract

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—emphasizing 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.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Oliver Bates
AU  - Carolynne Lord
AU  - Bran Knowles
AU  - Adrian Friday
AU  - Adrian Clear
AU  - Mike Hazas
PY  - 2015/09
DA  - 2015/09
TI  - Exploring (un)sustainable growth of digital technologies in the home
BT  - Proceedings of EnviroInfo and ICT for Sustainability 2015
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 300
EP  - 309
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.34
DO  - 10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.34
ID  - Bates2015/09
ER  -