[chisigmail] Guest Seminar: Paul Dourish, UC Irvine, Tue 16 Dec 2008 QUT

[Marcus Foth]

Guest seminar

Paul Dourish
University of California, Irvine

Sponsored by ACID and QUT iCi Urban Informatics


Tuesday 16th December 2008

12pm-2pm THE HALL (Z2-226) Creative Industries Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove



Persuasive Technologies, Ecotopian Agendas, and the Morality of  
Consumption:

Rethinking the Relationship between Human-Computer Interaction and  
Environmental Sustainability


Abstract

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities  
to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological  
consciousness on the part of technology users. In particular,  
contemporary technologies -- including mobile devices and ambient  
displays -- can be imagined to provide opportunities for reflection on  
personal and collective action, or for monitoring and visualization of  
behaviour and its relationship to environmental change. These efforts  
exploit recent explorations of the use of computers as persuasive  
technologies in domains such as health and fitness.

In this talk, I want to examine the limits of this work as currently  
construed. In particular, I want to argue that the framing of  
environmental consciousness in terms of personal moral choice has  
three problems. First, it commits to a form of ecological utopianism  
whose internal contradictions make it a questionable basis for  
practical action; second, it implicitly adopts a model of ecological  
market capitalism that may be as much a source of problem as one of  
solutions, and, third, it systematically closes off areas of inquiry  
that reach beyond individual morality and consumption. By drawing on  
research on ecological politics and the political economy of  
environmentalism, I'll suggest some new directions for the  
relationship between sustainability and HCI.


Biography

Paul is one of the most eminent figures in human computer interaction  
design. He is Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, where he also  
holds courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. In  
addition, he teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in  
Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE), and recently served for two  
years as Associate Director for Research at the California Institute  
for Telecommunications and Information Technology, an industry  
outreach research partnership supporting interdisciplinary research  
across campus. Before joining UCI, he spent over ten years in  
industrial research, latterly as a Senior Member of Research Staff in  
the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC. More information at http://www.dourish.com/


Please RSVP to Rosie Hill rosie at acid.net.au or 07 3337 7830 for  
catering purposes




facebook event entry:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=35165587761




--
Dr Marcus Foth
Australian Postdoctoral Fellow

Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology (CRICOS No. 00213J)
Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia
Phone +61 7 313 x88772 - Fax x88195 - Office Z6-511
m.foth at qut.edu.au - http://www.vrolik.de/publications/




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