Scaling up Action Through Collective Engagement with Environmental Data

Abstract: Sustainability has over the past two decades emerged as a key concern in human-computer interaction, with a much critiqued focus on quantification and eco-feedback. This approach fits within a modernist framing of sustainability, treating the environment (and our impact on it) as an externality, reducing it to a set of simple metrics. While data about the climate impact of our actions provide an important indication of harm, such data is fragmented and incomplete, capturing only a partial picture of a very wicked and entangled problem. My doctoral research departs from this notion of "information will solve the problem" and through design-oriented explorations of environmental data such as CO2 emissions from academic flying, I investigate alternative ways to engage people with environmental data in order to unsettle relations to the climate impact of our actions and foster care. So far, I have studied this through design-oriented case studies of data in action, with a specific focus on interventions aimed at engaging people in social contexts with the carbon emissions of everyday practices.