Challenging the Car Norm: Opportunities for ICT to Support Sustainable Transportation Practices

The use of practices as a unit of analysis has been suggested in order to scale up efforts within sustainable HCI and to shift the focus from changing individual behaviours to supporting transitions at a societal level. In this paper, we take a practice approach to the case of sustainable transportation, and more specifically to car-free transportation. Car use is intertwined in many practices and managing life without a car is difficult, particularly for people in contexts where owning at least one car per family is the norm. We studied three families in Stockholm who replaced their cars with different combinations of light electric vehicles during one year. From the families' experiences, we identified a number of opportunities for designers of interactive technologies to support environmental pioneers in the particular case of car-free living, as well as to support transitions towards sustainable practices in general.

[1]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Beyond being green: simple living families and ICT , 2013, CHI.

[2]  Tullia Jack.  Nobody was dirty: Intervening in inconspicuous consumption of laundry routines , 2013 .

[3]  Lenneke Kuijer,et al.  Identifying design opportunities for reduced household resource consumption: exploring practices of thermal comfort , 2012 .

[4]  B. Verplanken,et al.  Habit, information acquisition, and the process of making travel mode choices , 1997 .

[5]  P. Casey,et al.  Federal Highway Administration , 1994 .

[6]  E. Molin,et al.  Use and Effects of Advanced Traveller Information Services (ATIS): A Review of the Literature , 2006 .

[7]  Gabriel-Miro Muntean,et al.  eWARPE - Energy-efficient weather-aware route planner for electric bicycles , 2013, 2013 21st IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[8]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI , 2010, CHI.

[9]  S. C. Kuijer,et al.  Implications of Social Practice Theory for Sustainable Design , 2014 .

[10]  Lenneke Kuijer,et al.  A Practice Oriented Approach to User Centered Sustainable Design , 2009 .

[11]  MariAnne Karlsson,et al.  Travelers’ Motives for Adopting a New, Innovative Travel Service: Insights from the UbiGo Field Operational Test in Gothenburg, Sweden , 2014 .

[12]  Wsp Analysis.  The Stockholm Congestion Charges——5 Years on Effects,Acceptability and Lessons Learnt , 2012 .

[13]  Anna Kramers,et al.  Designing next generation multimodal traveler information systems to support sustainability-oriented decisions , 2014, Environ. Model. Softw..

[14]  Phoebe Sengers,et al.  Sustainably unpersuaded: how persuasion narrows our vision of sustainability , 2012, CHI.

[15]  Conny Bakker,et al.  Designing change by living change , 2012 .

[16]  Mika Pantzar,et al.  The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and how it Changes , 2012 .

[17]  J. Urry.  The ‘System’ of Automobility , 2004 .

[18]  Gregoris Mentzas,et al.  Choice architecture for environmentally sustainable urban mobility , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[19]  Åsa Nyblom.  Making plans or “just thinking about the trip”? Understanding people’s travel planning in practice , 2014 .

[20]  Yolande A. A. Strengers,et al.  Designing eco-feedback systems for everyday life , 2011, CHI.

[21]  Nervo Verdezoto,et al.  Beyond the Individual: The Contextual Wheel of Practice as a Research Framework for Sustainable HCI , 2015, CHI.

[22]  Paul Dourish,et al.  HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[23]  Kiron Chatterjee,et al.  Online information-sharing: a qualitative analysis of community, trust and social influence amongst commuter cyclists in the UK , 2013 .

[24]  Gordon Walker,et al.  Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life , 2010 .

[25]  Liam J. Bannon,et al.  The turn to practice in HCI: towards a research agenda , 2014, CHI.

[26]  Barry A. T. Brown,et al.  Into the wild: challenges and opportunities for field trial methods , 2011, CHI.

[27]  James A. Landay,et al.  UbiGreen: investigating a mobile tool for tracking and supporting green transportation habits , 2009, CHI.

[28]  Manfred Tscheligi,et al.  'Sometimes it's the weather's fault': sustainable HCI & political activism , 2014, CHI Extended Abstracts.