Persuasive Technologies, Ecotopian Agendas, and the Morality of Consumption

Rethinking the Relationship between Human-Computer Interaction and Environmental Sustainability

Guest speaker: Paul Dourish, University of California, Irvine

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. In particular, contemporary technologies -- including mobile devices and ambient displays -- can be imagined to provide opportunities for reflection on personal and collective action, or for monitoring and visualization of behaviour and its relationship to environmental change. These efforts exploit recent explorations of the use of computers as persuasive technologies in domains such as health and fitness.

In this talk, I want to examine the limits of this work as currently construed. In particular, I want to argue that the framing of environmental consciousness in terms of personal moral choice has three problems. First, it commits to a form of ecological utopianism whose internal contradictions make it a questionable basis for practical action; second, it implicitly adopts a model of ecological market capitalism that may be as much a source of problem as one of solutions, and, third, it systematically closes off areas of inquiry that reach beyond individual morality and consumption. By drawing on research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism, I'll suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI.

Biography

Paul is one of the most eminent figures in human computer interaction design. He is Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. In addition, he teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE), and recently served for two years as Associate Director for Research at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, an industry outreach research partnership supporting interdisciplinary research across campus. Before joining UCI, he spent over ten years in industrial research, latterly as a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC. More information at http://www.dourish.com/

Sponsored by ACID and QUT iCi Urban Informatics