Nourishing the ground for sustainable HCI: considerations from ecologically engaged art

ABSTRACT

Sustainable HCI is now a recognized area of human-computer interaction drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including the arts. How might HCI researchers working on sustainability productively understand the discourses and practices of ecologically engaged art as a means of enriching their own activities? We argue that an understanding of both the history of ecologically engaged art, and the art-historical and critical discourses surrounding it, provide a fruitful entry-point into a more critically aware sustainable HCI. We illustrate this through a consideration of frameworks from the arts, looking specifically at how these frameworks act more as generative devices than prescriptive recipes. Taking artistic influences seriously will require a concomitant rethinking of sustainable HCI standpoints - a potentially useful exercise for HCI research in general.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
art, design, reflective HCI, sustainable HCI