Activity: Talk or presentation (Unpublished) › Invited Talk
Description
Sustainability issues like climate change are increasingly recognised as wicked problems that require radically new forms of living to mitigate their harmful effects. Typical responses to these challenges in pervasive and ubiquitous computing research have been to focus on new sensing technologies for disaggregating domestic resource consumption, and on designs for energy-centric interventions at home. In this talk, I will draw on social practice theory to highlight how such approaches are limited for addressing sustainability challenges because of the ways that they frame resource use as being the result of individual decisions and behaviours. From here, I will develop some assertions for what this theoretical framing means for the business of doing design for sustainability. As well as considering methodological aspects, I will explore how a social practice lens on everyday life can help open up new spaces for design that are critical to meaningfully engage with sustainability.