The recent democratization of personal fabrication has significantly advanced the maker movement and reshaped applied research in HCI and beyond. However, this growth has also raised increasing sustainability concerns, as material waste is an inevitable byproduct of making and rapid prototyping. In this work, we examine the sustainability landscape within the modern maker community, focusing on grassroots makerspaces and maker-oriented research labs through in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders involved in making and managing making-related activities. Our findings highlight four key themes: the various types of "waste" generated through the making process, the strategies (or lack thereof) for managing this waste, the motivations driving (un)sustainable practices, and the challenges faced. We synthesize these insights into design considerations and takeaways for technical HCI researchers and the broader community, focusing on future tools, infrastructures, and educational approaches to foster sustainable making.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713665
In light of machine learning's increasing computational needs, developers created energy and carbon-reporting tools to calculate and communicate their models' environmental impact. These tools use modeling parameters as inputs and respond with expected or incurred energy requirements or carbon emissions. This work critically and systematically analyses them regarding their content, form, and design process. Besides their noble intentions, many of the shortcomings of early sustainable HCI eco-feedback tools are still being propagated in these tools. Moreover, their design and development have limited inclusion of potential stakeholders. We argue the need for a next generation of approaches to ML eco-feedback that (a) further support rematerialization, (b) use participatory approaches in their design and development to support collaborative team environments and go beyond individual persuasion, (c) consider complexities of ML models and processes, and more broadly, (d) re-center around sufficiency rather than only efficiency.
Researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have studied the design and use of technologies for sustainability and development, contributing to the subfields of Sustainable HCI and HCI for Development. Increasingly, there have been calls within and outside HCI for a more integrated approach to sustainable development. To identify the potential of such an approach, we present a comprehensive review of HCI scholarship on sustainability and development, combined with an analysis of interviews with researchers working in and across both subfields. Using the lens of political economy, we uncover understandings, critiques, tensions, and considerations toward advancing scholarship at the intersections of sustainability, development, and HCI. We conclude by inviting the larger Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) community to join us in collectively devising pathways for technology-mediated sustainable development.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713663
Many design researchers have been exploring what it means to take a more-than-human design approach in their practice. In particular, the technique of “noticing” has been explored as a way of intentionally opening a designer’s awareness to more-than-human worlds. In this paper we present autoethnographic accounts of our own efforts to notice solar energy. Through two studies we reflect on the transformative potential of noticing the more-than-human, and the difficulties in trying to sustain this change in oneself and one’s practice. We propose that noticing can lead to activating exiled capacities within the noticer, relational abilities that lie dormant in each of us. We also propose that emphasising sense-fullness in and through design can be helpful in the face of broader psychological or societal boundaries that block paths towards more relational ways of living with non-humans.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713239
We propose an interactive tool that enables reusing printed circuit boards (PCB) as prototyping materials to implement new circuits — this extends the utility of PCBs rather than discards them as e-waste. To enable this, our tool takes a user’s desired circuit schematic and analyzes its components and connections to find methods of creating the user’s circuit on discarded PCBs (e.g., e-waste, old prototypes). In our technical evaluation, we utilized our tool across a diverse set of PCBs and input circuits to characterize how often circuits could be implemented on a different board, implemented with minor interventions (trace-cutting or bodge-wiring), or implemented on a combination of multiple boards — demonstrating how our tool assists with exhaustive matching tasks that a user would not likely perform manually. We believe our tool offers: (1) a new approach to prototyping with electronics beyond the limitations of breadboards and (2) a new approach to reducing e-waste during electronics prototyping.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714095
Prototyping large, electronically integrated structures is challenging and often results in unwieldy wiring, weak mechanical properties, expensive iterations, or limited reusability. While many electronics prototyping kits exist for small-scale objects, relatively few methods exist to freely iterate large and sturdy structures with integrated electronics. To address this gap, we present the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK), which uses reconfigurable blocks that assemble into high-stiffness, lightweight structures with integrated electronics. We do this by creating cubic blocks composed of PCBs that carry electrical routing and components and can be (re)configured with simple tools into a variety of structures. To ensure structural stability without expertise, we created a tool to configure structures and simulate applied loads, which we validated with mechanical testing data. Using VIK, we produced devices reconfigured from a shared set of voxels: multiple iterations of a customizable AV lounge seat, a dance floor game, and a force-sensing bridge.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713948
PCB (printed circuit board) substrates are often single-use, leading to material waste in electronics making. We introduce PCB Renewal , a novel technique that "erases" and "reconfigures" PCB traces by selectively depositing conductive epoxy onto outdated areas, transforming isolated paths into conductive planes that support new traces. We present the PCB Renewal workflow, evaluate its electrical performance and mechanical durability, and model its sustainability impact, including material usage, cost, energy consumption, and time savings. We develop a software plug-in that guides epoxy deposition, generates updated PCB profiles, and calculates resource usage. To demonstrate PCB Renewal’s effectiveness and versatility, we repurpose a single PCB across four design iterations spanning three projects: a camera roller, a WiFi radio, and an ESPboy game console. We also show how an outsourced double-layer PCB can be reconfigured, transforming it from an LED watch to an interactive cat toy. The paper concludes with limitations and future directions.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714276