Towards a social practice theory perspective on sustainable HCI research and design

This chapter grapples with a conundrum of scales in sustainable HCI (SHCI): on the one hand, it is now widely agreed that our current ways of living are unsustainable and that if we have any chance at a sustainable future, fundamental changes in these are required. On the other hand, many of the approaches that HCI research and design are taking in addressing sustainability challenges are much too limiting, in various ways, in the context of the scale of change required to avoid catastrophic climate change. In this chapter, we draw on social practice theory framings of energy use (and other resource consumption that leads to the emission of harmful greenhouse gases) to develop some assertions for what such theoretical underpinnings mean for the business of doing design for sustainability. We conclude that we need effective ways for doing transdisciplinary research and design; we need ways of working at broader temporal scales that account for historical and future trajectories of practice in design; and we propose a framework of social practice theory and design fiction as a promising approach to augment existing practice-oriented design.