Vanessa Thomas

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Roy Bendor, Editor

Research at the intersection of sustainability and computing often engages with external stakeholders, and those engagements can determine success and impact of the sustainable goals as well as the entire research. In this paper, we reflect on various stakeholder en- gagements to derive lessons for the ICT4S community that seeks to broaden its sustainable impact beyond their own field. We briefly describe our experiences with case studies from each of the individual author’s research, and then synthesize across those experiences to reflect on similarities and differences. The resulting discussion highlights what we feel were our important lessons learned, as well as some of our thoughts on how to approach collab- orations or deployments with external stakeholders in sustainable computing projects.

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.

Lickable Cities is a research project that responds to the recent and overwhelming abundance of non-calls for gustatory exploration of urban spaces. In this paper, we share experiences from nearly three years of nonrepresentational, absurdist, and impractical research. During that time, we licked hundreds of surfaces, infrastructures, and interfaces in cities around the world. We en-countered many challenges from thinking with, designing for, and interfacing through taste, including: - how can and should we grapple with contamination?, and - how might lickable interfaces influence more-than-humans? We discuss these challenges to compassionately question the existing framework for designing with taste in HCI.

Much like computing, public policy is ubiquitous. It influences what we can do; where, when, and how we can pursue available services or activities; and who is involved along the way. The wide reach of public policy has inspired members of the HCI community to host public policy forums, write public policy papers, and call for increased engagement with the actors and governance tools that shape public policy (Lazar et al., 2016). These latter calls to engage with policy have extended to the environmental sphere (Goodman, 2009; Håkansson & Sengers, 2014, Knowles et al., 2014; Silberman et al., 2014) and have opened up several exciting questions for the HCI community to consider. These questions include: With which environmental public policies should we engage? How should we engage with those policies? For what aims, and at what scales, should we engage with them? Few clear answers have been proposed to these questions, perhaps because few clear answers exist. Environmental public policy (EPP) is a broad domain to navigate, and opportunities for the HCI community to engage with EPPs might appear limited. However, many EPPs speak directly to issues addressed by, or of interest to, the HCI community, and a concrete discussion of the aforementioned questions seems timely.

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan, Editor