SIGCHI UK is pleased to be cooperating with SICSA on their upcoming workshop on Sustainability in Human-computer Interaction – Insights from Permaculture.
The workshop will take place at Edinburgh Napier University on Thursday 1st September 2016.
Summary
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research into sustainability has been a hot topic for around 10 years. During this time notions of an Anthropocene have propagated throughout research communities – centralizing humankind’s agency in environmental degradation. Many CHI and other workshops have wrestled with the complexities, paradoxes and politics of this often-contentious field of enquiry. However, HCI is also a solution-focused field, so this workshop seeks to understand ways that HCI can be ‘re-made’ a sustainable practice and perspective. Recent workshops have called for the sustainable HCI community to draw on insights from fields outside of traditional HCI to move the research forward. Thus, this workshop looks to the solution-focused design practice and philosophy of Permaculture as an approach to addressing sustainability – focusing on its design principles and ethics. Patrick Whitefield defines Permaculture as “ a design system for human habitats which work with nature rather than against it. It is modeled on natural systems, and makes use of both traditional and modern science.”
Full details, including how to register, can be found here.