Sustainable HCI: Blending permaculture and user-experience

Benyon, David; Egan, Callum

Abstract

For approximately 10 years the SIGCHI Sustainable HCI (sHCI) and Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) communities have debated the contribution that HCI can make to sustainability. However, there has been little real progress in the field with few, if any, methods arising that take the discipline further. In this paper we present an approach to sHCI and SID that involves doing. Building on approaches from the maker community we propose to blend aspects of permaculture — an approach to sustainable agriculture — and user experience (UX) design to produce gardens that demonstrate sustainable practice and deliver a good UX. By blending the constructs from UX with those from permaculture and expressing the blends through the " material anchor " of gardens we create novel design interventions. These lead to user experiences that invite people to reflect on what sustainability really means and how people can make a difference.

Citation

Benyon, D., & Egan, C. (2017, June). Sustainable HCI: Blending permaculture and user-experience. Presented at DIS: Designing Interactive Systems, Edinburgh

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: DIS: Designing Interactive Systems
• Start Date: Jun 10, 2017
• End Date: Jun 14, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Apr 10, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Jun 10, 2017
• Publication Date: Jun 10, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jun 2, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 2, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 39-43
• Book Title: DIS '17 Companion Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems
• ISBN: 9781450349918
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064857.3079115
• Keywords: Permaculture, user experience (UX), blending theory
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/849376
• Contract Date: Jun 2, 2017