Have We Taken On Too Much?: A Critical Review of the Sustainable HCI Landscape

By CHI 2022, fifteen years will have passed since the emergence of Sustainable HCI (SHCI), which now constitutes an important subfield of HCI. In this paper, we draw on two SHCI corpora to ask: Has SHCI progressed? How has the field responded to prominent critiques? Have we identified and adopted constructive strategies for impacting environmental unsustainability? We further show the wide array of competencies SHCI researchers have been called to develop, and how this has been reflected in subsequent work. Our analysis identifies significant shifts in the SHCI landscape, toward research that is diverse and holistic, but also away from efforts to address the urgent climate crisis. We posit that SHCI has tended to take on far more than it could reasonably expect to deliver, and propose ‘Green Policy informatics’ as a pathway that enables SHCI to leverage a more traditional HCI skillset in addressing climate change.