Facilitation of sustainability through appropriation-enabling design

Abstract

We propose that sustainable interaction design can benefit from the notion of appropriation-enabling design in the sense that designing for appropriation can promote renewal and reuse of software and hardware artifacts. To this end, we establish the relation between sustainable interaction design and appropriation, identify three appropriation-enabling design challenges, suggest tentative solutions to them and assess an existing system to illustrate effects of certain appropriation-enabling design decisions on overall system sustainability. We propose that the perspective propagated by us can further HCI paradigms that allow for appropriative interaction, thus helping to sustain computing resources by promoting the prolonged use of software artifacts. This approach is based on the assumption that prolonged use of software solutions will ultimately lead to the longevity of the hardware artifacts on which they operate.