Hello everyone. My name is Sabrina Scuri
and I’m presenting the paper “Hitting the TBL: Widening the HCI approach to sustainability”.
This work surveys recent literature published in the field of Sustainable HCI,
a branch of HCI that is concerned with sustainability as a notion of viable futures.
In particular, this contribution has the goal of understanding how Sustainable Development
has been approached by our community. This work results from a dialogue
between disciplines. In fact, we are a group
of co-authors from different disciplinary backgrounds that share an interest in the
topics of sustainability and social good. Most importantly, we share the belief that in
order for HCI solutions to fully deliver on their promise of sustainability, the three dimensions of
Sustainable Development – environmental, social, and economic - must be approached holistically.
In a nutshell, our article advances a systematic review, looking at how
the pillars of Sustainable Development play into the HCI discourse on sustainability.
Our systematic search of peer-reviewed articles was based on the PRISMA Framework
and resulted in a total of 77 records to be included in the review.
For the purpose of the analysis, the articles included in the corpus were classified according
to the Triple Bottom Line framework. The Triple Bottom Line was proposed by
John Elkington as a framework for measuring the performance of a business in terms of
its environmental, social and economic impacts. We chose such a framework for several reasons.
First, as it considers environmental, social and economic as the main dimensions of sustainability,
it aligns with the concept of Sustainable Development.
Second, the Triple Bottom Line was designed as a framing and accounting tool.
Therefore, it's particularly suitable to assess the ability of the HCI community
to deliver solutions that promote the regeneration of our economies,
society and the environment. Finally, it provides a clear, operational,
and holistic definition of sustainability, which could help direct future research.
Due to time limitations, I’ll discuss only the main finding from our analysis;
but I invite you to read the paper for more details about the trends observed.
Now, in line with findings from previous work by Neris and colleagues,
our analysis suggests that the HCI community fails to take a holistic approach to sustainability.
In particular, our review identifies the economic angle as a critical gap in HCI literature.
However, this is a fundamental area of research because the economy can and should be designed.
As digital technologies provide the opportunity to re-imagine our economic system,
we believe that the HCI community can play a fundamental role in creating
sustainable economies and ultimately deliver solutions that hit the Triple Bottom Line.
HCI literature speaks clearly to the need of thinking about
the economic aspects of the Triple Bottom Line.
But to do so, we need to look at the economy in a new light.
In fact, what emerges from our analysis is that HCI contributions are still primarily focusing
on the economy as capitalist constructs. In other words, the mainstream HCI practice
is to look at economics from a neo-classical perspective.
A perspective that reduces the notion of economics to the mere study of market exchange activities,
whose only focus is on growth. As an example, in their article, Borning
and colleagues argue that the modern economy is one of the main forces that push back from
noticing the materiality of digital technologies and consequently their environmental impact.
As a solution to counter this force the authors suggest to ‘let the prices tell the truth’.
This, by taxing the material impact of such technologies and ultimately making it visible.
Their argument is based on the assumption that the market is fundamentally incompatible with
the climate crisis; hence they suggest an approach that penalizes violations.
Here we argue that neoliberal economics is not the only one possible.
In order to hit the Triple Bottom Line, we need to look at other economic disciplines,
especially those that do not place the market at the center.
Heterodox economics like feminist or socialist, just to name some, do not focus on economies
as engines for growth, but rather from a social-construct perspective that takes into
account the political economy - namely the balance of power -, which is inherent in all systems.
Adopting a political economy approach implies understanding the tacit interactions created
by people’s activities in an economic context and how they affect the entire
network of relationships between human, non-human and the broad environment.
By looking at economics through this lens, we cannot reduce it anymore to a mere discussion
about market exchange activities. On the contrary, it clearly includes
and orchestrates a wider set of activities, namely production, consumption and exchange,
which in their turn, are surrounded and influenced by social, cultural and political forces.
Here we posit that in order for HCI interventions to achieve scalable,
long-lasting sustainable impact, we need to understand and unpack
all the tacit interactions that occur across consumption, production and exchange.
But let me provide you with an example to illustrate this proposed approach.
Community Supported Agriculture is aimed at establishing a direct connection between producers
and consumers of locally grown food. In a traditional analysis,
the focus would be on the CSA community itself. Thus, from a first-order interaction perspective
only, a sustainable solution would be the one that helps producers to expand their consumer base.
However, if we extend the boundaries of this analysis to the second- and third-order
interactions, we realize that to create a climate-neutral and socially just food
system we need to think further. For example, many CSA communities
suffer from a paradox of exclusivity. Thus, to create a second-order effect,
we need to deliver a solution that enables access to organic food also to low-income earners.
Finally, a way to design the exchange interaction space and create third-order effect we could for
example support the cooperation between different CSAs so as to enable them to deliver at scale.
To conclude, we conducted a systematic literature review with the goal of investigating how the
pillars of Sustainable development play into the HCI discourse on sustainability.
Results from our analysis identify the economic angle as a critical gap in HCI literature.
By looking at economic theories and concepts, we elaborated - and
illustrated through examples - an approach for SHCI research to address the economic
angle – namely through understanding first, second, and third order interaction effects.
This work is therefore a call for action for the HCI community to contribute to
redesigning our economy and ultimately rebalance the triple bottom line.
Last but not least, we hope that this article could encourage the creation of
venues for a mutually beneficial dialog between HCI and economic disciplines.
Thank you for your attention.