Bringing Sustainability through, in, and of HCI into the Conversation
7th July 2023
Sebastian Prost led the research team on this sustainability work.
Seb and I created the Sustainability Reflection Cards, which we've been working on over the past couple of years. Theses cards, still a work-in-progress, break down some of the many facets of sustainability, allowing people to think about how they might address them one at a time.
The card deck is based around an existing research method called 'Circles of Sustainability' by Paul James. This was of looking at sustainability breaks it down into four domains. For our cards we actually use five domains, James' original four: Culture, Ecology, Economy, and Politics with the addition of a new domain of our own, Technology.
I worked with Seb to help make the cards into the most useable version of James' method, through illustration, colour, and layout. We chose to represent each domain with an animal, referencing traditional playing card designs, and we colour-coded the domains to make sorting through the cards as easy as possible to let teams identify their main priorities and oversights during an evaluation.
We worked on both a physical, printed, deck of cards for studios to use again and again as a workshop tool, and an online only version, designed to be used with collaborative online tools, like Miro.
For DIS 2023, Seb organised a workshop, using the cards, to help bring this multi-faced way of seeing sustainability into the HCI research community. We had a vibrant discussion, with attendees from across the world, details of which will be published soon. The workshop gave us lots of valuable insights into the cards themselves, which will help us make the next version even better, and hopefully even more sustainable.
Sustainability Reflection Cards, Image Credit: Henry Collingham