Impoverished Visions of Sustainability: Encouraging Disruption in Digital Learning Environments

Through this paper we step away from the proposition that there is one universally accepted notion of sustainability. We introduce the CSCW community to the scholarship of Anthony Weston, a philosopher who offers a way to acknowledge and leverage the plurality of values that inform conceptualizations of environmental sustainability. We use key themes from Weston's philosophy to analyze three social computing applications that employ tropes of sustainability, and explore their potential as sites of critical and disruptive discourse. Our focus is on openly or commercially available digital tools, simulations, and experiences that support the broader public, including children, learning about the environment and sustainability concepts. We posit that Weston's work provides an innovative framework for Sustainable HCI, one that is in alignment with the growing diversity of approaches to design in Sustainable HCI, alternatives to designing for tightly bounded problems and anticipated solutions.

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