A Methodology and a Tool to Support the Sustainable Design of Interactive Systems: Adapting systemic design tools to model complexity in interaction design

Abstract

Sustainable HCI was initially structured along two axes: sustainability in design, i.e. reducing the material impact of software and hardware, and sustainability through design, i.e. influencing user behavior to reduce energy consumption. These approaches have been criticized for being reductive and insufficient in the face of the systemic problem of ecological transition. Some voices in the HCI community call for a broader consideration of non-human aspects in HCI and argue that new methods and tools should be developed for this purpose. The thesis aims at proposing a methodology to understand the interactions between the system to be designed (e.g. agricultural robot) and the dynamics of the socio-technical and social system (e.g. the agriculture and food sectors), in order to avoid simplistic solutions that could be counter-productive (e.g. rebound effect). It draws on the methods, tools, and techniques of systemic design (a recent field of research that brings together design and systems thinking) in order to build, with the stakeholders and the help of experts, a model of the socio-technical system, its dynamics, and its possible interactions with the system to be designed. The aim is not to build a "digital twin"of the socio-technical system from which one could predict its evolution, but rather to co-build a handmade and approximate model to support debate, to inform decisions, and to compare scenarios. To this end, the thesis proposes a "quali-quantitative"modeling tool based on the formalism of causal loop diagrams.