Scaffolding Sustainability in the Academic HCID Practice

This paper is concerned with a sustainable academic human-computer interaction design (HCID) practice. We are interested in examining what such practice could involve, and how to implement changes towards increased sustainability. Reflecting over the fate of 120 prototypes, both analog and digital, developed during the last eight years as part of author’s research projects or with students as part of the HCI course work, it is deduced that the process of establishing a more sustainable design practice in the academic HCI is related to increased awareness of sustainable alternatives in and through design, enabling factors such as providing for materials and giving good examples of sustainable practices and design, and satisfaction factors. Further, the following points clearly come forth from this reflection: 1) prototyping in HCI is about incremental improvement (incremental innovation), some novel ideas do turn up (real innovation), but most of the time, the fate of prototypes is to be abandoned 2) making HCID practice sustainable starts with building awareness around sustainability through education 3) there is a need for discussion within HCID community around best practices in this area. Reprint of a paper published in: Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Interfaces and Human-Computer Interaction 2014 , pp. 45-54. Made available here with permission from IADIS: www.iadis.or