Commentaries on the special issue on practice-oriented approaches to sustainable HCI

As evidenced by this special issue, practice is a subject of considerable interest in sustainable HCI. This includes studying everyday practices and their relation to sustainability, and considering practice as a unit of design [Kuijer et al. 2013], that is, as something that might be approached in a manner akin to the design of products and services. This turn towards practices and practice theory is an important contribution to the development of HCI because it focuses research and design attention toward the common activities of life and how those common activities are woven together with a wide range of sustainability concerns. For instance, through investigations into the practices of repair we can gain valuable insight into tactical alternatives to the prevailing logics of planned obsolescence [Wakkary et al. 2013]. Similarly, attending to the corporeal aspects of the everyday, from the sensation of cold feet [Pink et al. 2013] to the experience of walking [Bidwell et al. 2013], reminds us that sustainability is a lived endeavor. In the tradition of critical reflective HCI [Sengers et al. 2005], in this essay I offer another way to conceptualize practices, and specifically, the relation of design to everyday practices and sustainable HCI. Critical and reflective approaches play an important role in sustainable HCI by analyzing the epistemologies that undergird research and design, and offering generative interpretations that can be used to produce interventions and ever-thicker descriptions. In this essay, I provide a shift in perspective that calls attention to the relational character of practices and explicitly includes design as being among those everyday practices. In discussing ‘design’ I’m referring to design within HCI specifically, but most of my assertions and arguments may also be extended to design more broadly. What is most significant to this special issue is that the perspectives of practice theory offers