Using a conceptual 'Sustainable Lens' to form a research agenda

Speaker: Professor Samuel Mann, Community Chair of Sustainability at CHI, Chair of CITRENZ, Lecturer at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand

Abstract:

Imagine you had a pair of glasses that had a sustainability mode. This mode meant that you looked at the world through a “sustainable lens”. What would you see? These lenses wouldn’t merely be green tinted glasses like the ones from the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, instead consider the following statement: “As a society we have to learn to live in a complex world of interdependent systems with high uncertainties and multiple legitimate interests. These complex and evolving systems require a new way of thinking about risk, uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance. These systems require that we can think simultaneously of drivers and impacts of our actions across scales and barriers of space, time, culture, species and disciplinary boundaries” (Mann 2011). Using this statement as a guide, sustainable computing should not be seen as an extra subject area and should not be confused with ‘green’, or merely as information systems that happen to be about the about the environment. Instead it provides a context for everything we do. This presentation proposes a conceptual Sustainable Lens as an underlying metaphor for a research agenda in development of a sustainable approach to interaction design. A set of questions are posed using the Sustainable Lens to form a research agenda.

Bio: Professor Samuel Mann, the author of "Sustainable Lens: a visual guide", and "The Green Graduate: Educating Every Student as a Sustainable Practitioner", is Community Chair of Sustainability at CHI, and chair of CITRENZ. He teaches at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand and has a weekly radio show SustainableLens.org