SUSTAINABLY OURSTwo digital divides and four perspectives

warming pervades present-day popular press in a manner that could not have been conceived just a few years ago. There is clear consensus among the scientific community that carbon-dioxide-producing human behaviors are closely linked to and a primary cause of global warming and that continuing without acting differently is unsustainable and holds disastrous consequences for humanity as a virtual certainty. Not the least of these virtually certain consequences is the creation of groups of environmental refugees on a massive scale, as regions of the earth cease to be inhabitable. There is not much controversy but surprising novelty in the claim that interaction design, indeed all software design, and computing hardware design and marketing practices are implicated in this issue. We as an interaction-design community need to take steps to lay solid foundations to ensure that sustainability numbers among the central foci of all that is designed in the name and service of human-centered computing. By sustainability , I mean especially but not exclusively the sense of environmental sustainability. There are other senses of sustainability, including such concerns as public health and wellness, social equity and globalization, urbanization and poverty, food and the politics of food, and many other issues for which our present choices about how we live hold implications for our future choices about how we will be able to live. I have chosen the title " Sustainably Ours " to suggest two things about sustainability. First, sustainability is collectively ours in the sense that it is an issue of collective global fate accumulated from individual and sovereign actions. Second, our CHI community is especially responsible for certain issues of sustainability and approaches to sustainability that are ours—namely, (i) understanding— learning how and why interaction design acts as a catalyst to material effects, and (ii) promotion of alternative behaviors—the use of interaction design to promote sustainable behaviors, and (iii) designing otherwise—developing a sustainable practice and cultural-economic frame for the design of interactive technologies, themselves. The material effects above I have elsewhere described as a rubric of possible material effects [1] of particular interactive systems which includes disposal, salvage, recycling, remanufacturing for reuse, reuse as is, achieving longevity of use, sharing for maximal use, achieving heirloom status, finding wholesome alternatives to use, and active repair of misuse. I have also elsewhere postulated several design principles for how to conduct interaction design otherwise from the perspective of sustainability. These design principles …