This is a rebroadcast of the Friday Informatics Seminar hosted March 20, 2009 at 3:15pm in 6011 Donald Bren Hall

Speaker:
Paul Dourish
Professor, Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

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.