One way to counteract anthropogenic climate change, is to reduce individual energy consumption. An especially energy-intensive everyday practice is doing the laundry. In Germany, laundry accounts for about 5% of domestic electricity consumption. In part, this is because users do not make use of the energy-saving programs offered by modern washing machines. Based on different principles of behavior change, we created four concepts for washing machine interfaces to encourage users to choose energy-saving programs and settings. These concepts were implemented as functional prototypes. An online experiment (N=400) showed that all concepts increased the choice of energy-saving programs compared to a standard machine. Especially effective was to interrupt impulsive actions and suggest alternative choices (concept B) and to restructure the entry of settings (concept E). This demonstrates how small changes in a standard interfaces can significantly increase the probability of energy conservation in a private setting.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581150
Urban environmental monitoring campaigns depend on expertise from city agencies, residents, and researchers. Deployment efforts rarely include all three stakeholders, typically leading to initiatives that struggle to produce credible, actionable data. We describe the implementation of a large-scale, long-term air quality sensing network in Chicago Illinois; detail stakeholder interviews and meetings; and present three interfaces--a website accessible via in-situ QR codes, APIs, and a mobile, mixed-media experience. We show how a collaborative approach created a more equitable sensor distribution compared to crowdsourced or regulatory designs. We highlight shared goals of education, engagement, and empowerment despite the diversity of tool and analytics needs across stakeholder groups. Reflecting on our work, we develop a "three-legged stool'' framework representing the criticality of balanced participation from three key stakeholder groups--city, community, and research--in deploying novel urban technologies. This approach can help HCI researchers facilitate more democratic technology deployments in urban spaces.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581289
Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well-being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping review to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded throughout the broader SHCI literature and to find new research opportunities. We identify several themes that could benefit from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies. Finally, we discuss opportunities for further work on marine human-natural systems research in SHCI and interdisciplinary collaboration with marine science and coastal communities.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581291
Technological progress has often been measured by the extent to which it shields and protects us from the harshness of nature. At the same time, it has long been recognised that our resulting disengagement from nature negatively affects our wellbeing and impedes awareness of our vital dependence on natural environments. To understand how HCI has considered the possibilities that digital technology offers for engaging with nature, we conducted a scoping review encompassing more than 20 years of HCI research on nature engagement. We compare the orientations, motivations, and methodologies of different threads within this growing body of work. We show how HCI research has enabled varied forms of direct and indirect engagement with nature, and we develop a typology of the roles proposed for technology in this work. We highlight promising and under-utilised approaches to designing for nature engagement and discuss directions for future research.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581534
Engaging with nature enriches people’s life greatly, and it is a particularly powerful wellbeing activity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in HCI and beyond seek to augment and extend the relationship people have with nature through technology, to positively enhance their health as a result. In this paper, we report on a scoping review that examines research exploring health, nature, and technology research. By charting 29 papers from the last five years, we produce a situated snapshot of the current research landscape and identify three trends within the paper pool: Despite the potential for rich, experiential engagements, human-nature interaction is often understood as an endeavour that is 1) universal, 2) flattened and 3) disconnected from everyday life. We reflect on our findings to outline design opportunities for human-nature interaction that extend and re-orientate it; to design for multi-dimensional caring experiences that allow for a more-than-just-human understanding of nature.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581479
When vibrations are synchronized with our actions, we experience them as material properties. This has been used to create virtual experiences like friction, counter-force, compliance, or torsion. Implementing such experiences is non-trivial, requiring high temporal resolution in sensing, high fidelity tactile output, and low latency. To make this style of haptic feedback more accessible to non-domain experts, we present Haptic Servos: self-contained haptic rendering devices which encapsulate all timing-critical elements. We characterize Haptic Servos’ real-time performance, showing the system latency is < 5 ms. We explore the subjective experiences they can evoke, highlighting that qualitatively distinct experiences can be created based on input mapping, even if stimulation parameters and algorithm remain unchanged. A workshop demonstrated that users new to Haptic Servos require approximately ten minutes to set up a basic haptic rendering system. Haptic Servos are open source, we invite others to copy and modify our design.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580716