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Eli Blevis
Preface
This paper continues, elaborates, and extends parts of one which has been accepted to appear as a long archival paper and presentation at the 2007 Annual Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2007. The conference paper title is "Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse," [1] hereafter referenced as the conference paper in this text. Among other things, it introduces a rubric of potential material effects of interactive information technologies and several design principles that form part of a perspective of sustainability. In this paper, I greatly expand on the description and illustration of the rubric in particular and distinguish between design criticism and critical design perspectives for both the rubric and the principles.
I state this detail not just as a matter of scholarly disclosure, but also as a portion of a tale of two constituencies, namely the SIGCHI constituency--also know as the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or synonymously, the interaction design constituency--and the design constituency, which is represented not only by the readership of and contributors to DPP, but also by the constituency that surrounds design issues, design studies, and other design journals, venues, and conferences. I use the term "constituency" in place of "community" deliberately to indicate that perspectives can vary widely within these less-than-communally-cohesive groups. In some sense, the design philosophy constituency can be characterized as one that is primarily concerned with design criticism, providing the understandings needed to uncover the effects of present courses of action and inform future ones. On the other hand, the interaction design consistency can be characterized as one that is primarily concerned with critical design--by which I mean the actual practice of design with the materials of information technologies critical to the goal of promoting sustainable ways of being which at its best is informed by design criticism and at its worst blindly promotes the unsustainable.
As topical as these differences in perspectives are--particularly in the HCI constituency, the discussion of them is only context for the central point--a vision and foundation for sustainability as a focus of interaction design. Since acting more sustainably with respect to our interactions with, and decisions about, the use of the...