Toward an ecological sensibility: tools for evaluating sustainable HCI

We are developing evaluation tools that help sustainable HCI researchers to contribute to the overall project of achieving sustainability. In this paper we argue for the importance of broadening sustainable HCI evaluation beyond traditional HCI evaluation. We note the widespread phenomenon of unintended environmental consequences, largely overlooked thus far in sustainable HCI evaluation. We discuss three categories of tools - principles, heuristics, and indices - that could facilitate evaluation of sustainable HCI projects, mainly by operationalizing definitions of sustainability. We suggest that sustainable HCI research could become more relevant by developing evaluations that link to understandings of sustainability beyond HCI, and more 'scientific' by developing more systematic evaluations, while acknowledging that many ways of knowing play important roles in both sustainability and HCI. Our next steps include developing these tools for sustainable HCI evaluation and applying them to published research.