title: Digital Technologies and Environmental Change
title: Examining the influence of social practices and public policies.
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Thomas, Vanessa
Publisher: name: Publisher unspecified
Year: 2017

description: Digital technologies and services affect the planet. Every line of code,
      every photo uploaded to ‘the cloud’, and every smartphone, computer, or
      ‘IoT’ device, has an environmental footprint. That footprint often takes
      the form of carbon dioxide emissions, ecosystem degradation, and resource
      depletion, each of which occur to varying degrees throughout the
      production, use, and end-of-life processing of digital technologies. In
      the past two decades, multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners have
      examined and responded to many aspects of these processes; the responses
      have taken diverse forms, including energy efficiency and design
      standards, restrictions on the use of hazardous materials, and the
      international adoption of rules and regulations about electronics waste
      (e-waste). Despite these responses, the global environmental footprint of
      digital technologies and services has continued to rise due to their
      growing ubiquity, dwindling lifespans, and ‘always on’ support
      infrastructure. 
      
      
      In this thesis, I respond directly to calls for increased analysis and
      discussion of the social practices and public policies that influence the
      environmental footprint of digital technologies (e.g. [83, 139, 232]). To
      narrow the scope of this broad line of enquiry, I focus on the social
      practices of retrocomputing repairers and human-computer interaction (HCI)
      academics— two communities whose practices influence the footprint of
      digital technologies—as well as environmental public policies that
      influence HCI practitioners. By drawing on secondary data and
      semi-structured qualitative interviews with 7 retrocomputing repairers and
      22 HCI academics, my thesis offers three sets of contributions to
      complementary and ongoing conversations within the HCI community. 
      
      
      The first two sets of contributions focus on the social practices of
      distinct but indirectly connected communities: retrocomputing repairers
      and HCI academics. While many HCI academics work to conceive of new
      digital products and services, the retro repairers actively work to
      maintain their ageing digital products in the face of increasingly scarce
      resources. Each group influences the environmental footprint in unique
      ways, which have been hitherto unexplored. I discuss some of these
      influences, and use them to highlight questions about existing and future
      HCI research. 
      
      
      The third set of contributions focuses on environmental public policies
      and HCI. By fusing two existing approaches to understanding public
      policies and their relevance to HCI, I highlight opportunities for HCI
      researchers to engage with and influence environmental public policy. This
      allows me to suggest ways that environmental public policy could influence
      and be influenced by HCI research.