By CHI 2022, fifteen years will have passed since the emergence of Sustainable HCI (SHCI), which now constitutes an important subfield of HCI. In this paper, we draw on two SHCI corpora to ask: Has SHCI progressed? How has the field responded to prominent critiques? Have we identified and adopted constructive strategies for impacting environmental unsustainability? We further show the wide array of competencies SHCI researchers have been called to develop, and how this has been reflected in subsequent work. Our analysis identifies significant shifts in the SHCI landscape, toward research that is diverse and holistic, but also away from efforts to address the urgent climate crisis. We posit that SHCI has tended to take on far more than it could reasonably expect to deliver, and propose 'Green Policy informatics' as a pathway that enables SHCI to leverage a more traditional HCI skillset in addressing climate change.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517609
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the daily life of college students, impacting their social life, education, stress levels and overall mental well-being. We study and assess behavioral changes of N=180 undergraduate college students one year prior to the pandemic as a baseline and then during the first year of the pandemic using mobile phone sensing and behavioral inference. We observe that certain groups of students experience the pandemic very differently. Furthermore, we explore the association of self-reported COVID-19 concern with students' behavior and mental health. We find that heightened COVID-19 concern is correlated with increased depression, anxiety and stress. We evaluate the performance of different deep learning models to classify student COVID-19 concerns with an AUROC and F1 score of 0.70 and 0.71, respectively. Our study spans a two-year period and provides a number of important insights into the life of college students during this period.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502043
HCI is increasingly concerned with health information quality and spread of misinformation on social media. Despite many major platforms having been adopted across the world, the situated evaluation and sharing of health information is underexplored across diverse health systems and cultural and political contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we study the navigation of health information on social media in urban and rural South India, backdropped by plural knowledges around health and the specific politics and sociality of health and social media in this setting. We use Ivan Illich's concept of tools for conviviality [49] to distinguish between how people creatively use tools versus how tools manage and impose values on people---participants aimed to use health information towards care beyond institutionalized healthcare, but insidious misinformation and information-sharing practices served to commodify, spark uncertainty in, and discipline caring behavior. We use our findings to expand understandings of the use of health information on social media and how positionality shapes how people are affected by and respond to misinformation. We also draw attention to the structural aspects of health misinformation in the Indian context and how the design of social media platforms might play a role in addressing it.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517622
The role of HCI in informal caregivers’ lives has been a focus of research for some time. Yet to gain significance in HCI, are the implications of healthcare systems’ transformation into a personalised care paradigm, where citizens gain choice and control over the delivery of their care. We provide a first HCI paper to examine self-directed care budgets for disabled citizens, where care funding is controlled by the individual. We explore how digital technology can assist citizens, promoting peer support to create meaningful, personalised healthcare infrastructures. This qualitative study contributes insights from interviews and focus groups with 24 disabled citizens, informal caregivers and healthcare officers, to provide understanding of their experiences and practices. These insights highlight relational care, invisible labour, power struggles with authorities and how citizens seek socio-technical capability. We contribute design implications for self-directed care budgets and HCI research concerned with developing technologies that support this population.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517697
Home health aides are a vulnerable group of frontline caregivers who provide personal and medically-oriented care in patients' homes. Their work is difficult and unpredictable, involving a mix of physical and emotional labor as they adapt to patients’ changing needs. Our paper presents an exploratory, qualitative study with 32 participants, that investigates design opportunities for Interactive Voice Assistants (IVAs) to support aides’ essential care work. We explore challenges and opportunities for IVAs to (1) fill gaps in aides' access to information and care coordination, (2) assist with decision making and task completion, (3) advocate on behalf of aides, and (4) provide emotional support. We then discuss key implications of our work, including how materiality may impact perceived ownership and usage of IVAs, the need to carefully consider tensions around surveillance, accountability, data collection, and reporting, and the challenges of centering aides as essential workers in complex home health care contexts.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517683