Games empowering active engagement in real-world climate adaptation measures are underexplored. Yet, bottom-up engagement is crucial for addressing natural hazard impacts at the community and individual levels. Our work employed an iterative research for and through co-design approach to develop a locally adapted tabletop game for a community-led educational Center. We tested the game onsite (n = 254), followed by two surveys, one immediately after playing (n = 57) and one conducted two weeks later (n = 11), assessing players' awareness, and sense of empowerment and agency. Results show an increase in participants' awareness of local countermeasures, a sense of agency, and their participatory efficacy in contributing to their own, their family's, and their community's climate resilience. Our work contributes a transferable game concept that reflects complex real-world interdependencies, empowering a sense of agency through practice-based game mechanics.
Frontend code, replicated across millions of page views, consumes significant energy and contributes directly to digital emissions. Yet current AI coding assistants, such as GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, emphasize developer speed and convenience, with energy impact not yet a primary focus. At the same time, existing energy-focused guidelines and metrics have seen limited adoption among practitioners, leaving a gap between research and everyday coding practice. To address this gap, we introduce EcoAssist, an energy-aware assistant integrated into an IDE that analyzes AI-generated frontend code, estimates its energy footprint, and proposes targeted optimizations. We evaluated EcoAssist through benchmarks of 500 websites and a controlled study with 20 developers. Results show that EcoAssist reduced per-website energy by 13–16% on average, increased developers’ awareness of energy use, and maintained developer productivity. This work demonstrates how energy considerations can be embedded directly into AI-assisted coding workflows, supporting developers as they engage with energy implications through actionable feedback.
In this paper, we explore teaching and learning ecological justice in a transformational game design context with sixteen American BIPOC low-income high school students. Participants took part in a three-session workshop in an urban metropolitan area, where we examined the affordances of a culturally relevant curriculum with our students as they learned about ecological justice. Students were tasked with creating narrative-based transformational games using Twine. Findings suggest that integrating culturally relevant pedagogy deepens students’ engagement and encourages them to share their personal experiences in the transformational games they created, leading to a transformational growth within the students themselves. Although, students’ games relied heavily on facts and guilt as persuasive tools, mirroring patterns in existing climate games, some games demonstrated more sophisticated approaches using restricted choices and narrative complexity. We theorize how this relates to our lessons on game design, the usage of Twine and the wider technological community.
In sustainable HCI, the `Cornucopian Paradigm' describes how the expansion of digital services goes hand in hand with the growth of digital infrastructure and its environmental footprint. Yet, the mechanisms driving this paradigm are not well understood at the design level. As a case study, we investigate how messaging apps factor in the cornucopian paradigm by conducting a feature analysis of 17 apps complemented with 12 user interviews. We identify four scale-up mechanisms that explain how design contributes to the cornucopian paradigm. These mechanisms all contribute to use intensification, i.e., digital practices becoming more intensive and leading to more data intensity, to infrastructure expansion, and indirectly to device obsolescence and replacement. Our analysis of use intensification builds upon a set of recurring cornucopian design patterns we identified in messaging apps. To mitigate the cornucopian paradigm, we propose a set of moderation heuristics to guide design decisions.
Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.
There have been repeated calls for more ecological approaches to Sustainable HCI, and for the inclusion of the sociopolitical, structural, historical, and geographical aspects that shape technology-mediated practices of sustainability. Contributing to this discourse, and drawing from scholarship on Law and IT, this paper explores how the law, technology design, market mechanisms, and social norms enable and constrain behaviours – that is, how they regulate them. We use these modalities to discuss two digital technologies: a gig-work platform mediating practices of waste transportation, and an eco-visualisation platform scraping sustainability reports of publicly listed companies. The analysis expands on the set of dynamics that characterise the relations between these practices of sustainability, technology design, and regulation. We conclude by discussing the relevance of this conceptualisation for HCI, specifically in defining the roles of designers as regulators, and regarding design for sustainability as constituted through varying entanglements of these modalities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into Building Automation Systems (BAS) to enhance energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Yet, rather than functioning as neutral optimization tools, AI in BAS operates within fragile infrastructures, limited resources, and institutional politics. We present a qualitative study of 23 interviews with energy professionals, AI researchers, and student representatives at the University of Toronto, an institution recognized for its sustainability leadership. Participants expressed ambivalence: AI was valued for forecasting and optimization, yet concerns arose around legitimacy, labor demands, and environmental paradoxes. Fairness in occupant comfort was highlighted, not as an inherent property of models but as a situated practice shaped by infrastructural governance negotiated across roles and inequities. Communication also emerged as a form of occupant agency, where human, machine, and AI-mediated dialogue makes automated decisions legible and contestable. These findings reframe AI in BAS as socio-technical infrastructure and inform our design recommendations for transparent, participatory, and just systems.