This paper characterizes six years of final projects from an interaction design master's program at our School of Design in Hong Kong. Our reporting includes a thematic analysis of the specific application areas in which these diverse designers made their choices, along the dimensions of values and vision (Should Do), concepts and approaches (Can Do), domain knowledge (Can Know), and interactive Forms. The dimensions of Should Do and Can Do are particularly privileged in this paper. In this particular reporting of our analysis, we are especially interested in trends relating to sustainability and its relation to other values-orientations. This interest owes to our concern as a faculty for fostering a school of thinking and practice that balances all of these dimensions. Our analysis demonstrates the use and value of the Should Do, Can Do, Can Know framing as an analytical tool for design. Moreover, our work characterizes the common strategies among our 101 designers. As such, it provides a lens and points of inspiration for others, more generally. As a service, we present our entire analysis in table form as an Appendix.
Sustainable polyculture gardens thrive more effectively when they are designed with an awareness of other gardens in the community, as opposed to as individual gardens. However, the complex characteristics of plants, and their relations to other plant species in terms of needs and capacities, require a complex knowledge base not easily acquired by novice gardeners. We contribute a demonstration of our project, called the Software for Agricultural Ecosystems (SAGE) Community Coordinator, that helps manage the complexities of plant relationships and provides planting suggestions based on existing plants in adjacent garden sites. The research team collected the requirements and developed a preliminary demonstration of this system. This demonstration shows the feasibility of the idea and lays the foundation for a more comprehensive implementation of the SAGE Community Coordinator. By doing so, this paper explores the use of technology to foster the establishment of complex plant assemblages in urban and suburban areas to address the current and future limits of material resources derived from plants.
A large portion of the software side of our information technology infrastructure, including web search, email, social media, transportation information, and much more, is provided "free" to the end users, although the corporations that provide this are often enormously profitable. The business model involves customized advertising and behavior manipulation, powered by intensive gathering and cross-correlation of personal information. Significant other parts of our IT infrastructure use fees-for-service but still involve intensive information gathering and behavior manipulation. There are significant indirect costs of these business models, including loss of privacy, supporting surveillance by both corporations and the state, automated manipulations of behavior, undermining the democratic process, and consumerism with its attendant environmental costs. In a recent book, Shoshana Zuboff terms this "surveillance capitalism." Our primary focus in this essay is how we could develop new models for providing these services. We describe some intermediate steps toward those models: education, regulation, and resistance. Following that, we discuss a partial solution, involving for-profit corporations that provide these services without tracking personal information. Finally, we describe desired characteristics for more comprehensive solutions, and outline a range of such solutions for different portions of the IT infrastructure that more truly return control to the end users. A common feature of several is the use of highly decentralized storage of information (either on the end user's own personal devices or on small servers), a modular architecture and interface to allow for customization of what information is to be shared, and a distributed ledger mechanism for authentication.
In the Anthropocene, we are looking at an impending future that is characterized by resource scarcity. In this paper we ask how socio-technical arrangements can facilitate a transition from the course we are on today to one of adaptation and conservation. Taking the case of citizen observatories (COs) for water quality conservation as an illustrative lens, this paper analyses the potential of COs to form Publics for management and stewardship of natural resources from a Computing within Limits perspective. Based on interviews, participant observations and co-design workshops with a wide range of stakeholders, we draw attention to 1) the complexities of water quality management in Sweden, 2) the differing views of policymakers and citizens about citizen participation in water governance and 3) designers' efforts in co-developing a sustainable socio-technical system for bringing about change in water quality management. Our work contributes to research on Computing within Limits by identifying opportunities and challenges that arise when designers seek to form Publics and through them transform institutional arrangements.
Research in ICT about forced displacement focuses mainly on refugees. Internally displaced people (IDPs), however, are rarely discussed in ICT and related disciplines. This paper aims to fill in the gap and provide an insight into the everyday lives of conflict-driven IDPs and their ICTs usage based on our original fieldwork at several IDP and refugee camps in northern Iraq. Our work includes extended field observations, surveys with 86 IDPs and 47 refugees, and examination of recent reports about IDPs from international NGOs that have been active in that region. Our findings illustrate that IDPs live under similar resource-constrained environment as refugees and, in some cases, suffer from even harsher restrictions. We highlight how these confines limit their ICTs usage and discuss opportunities for future ICT research and policy implication to improve the quality of life of the displaced residing within their own borders.
