Arjun Menon 80% seminar

Title: Fostering new perspectives around environmental data in the home

Abstract:

We face critical environmental crises driven largely by overconsumption in developed economies, with household consumption representing nearly 60% of global carbon, land, material, and water footprints. Despite extensive data documenting these impacts, consumption patterns continue to increase, suggesting fundamental limitations in how environmental data motivates behavioural change.

Environmental data—carbon footprints, energy usage metrics, water consumption figures—serves as the primary governance mode for organising sustainable futures, from UN Sustainable Development Goals to household eco-feedback systems. The underlying assumption is that presenting more data will prompt action, based on rationalist models of human decision-making. However, this approach has proven inadequate for achieving the scale of change required to address climate crisis and overconsumption.

The limitation stems partly from how we relate to and make meaning with environmental data. The presumed objective nature of metrics invites particular rationalist relations and representationalist meaning-making processes that often fail to connect abstract numbers with lived experience. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) initially approached household sustainability through technological solutions and persuasive technologies following these rationalist assumptions. However, scholars have increasingly criticised these limited framings and advocated for more relational approaches that embrace individual subjectivity and agency. Recent work recognises that environmental data can create 'objective but meaningless representations' of environmental phenomena. Given data's pervasiveness in sustainability discourse, this thesis argues for re-examining our predominantly cerebral relations with abstract environmental metrics. Instead, we need to foster new relational, embodied connections and meaning-making processes that build shared understandings about household consumption and encourage participation in change-making.
This research explores how design and data can support this endeavour through design experiments and case studies investigating human-environment-data relations. The objective is understanding how people engage in sense-making practices with environmental data and offering new scaffolds for forming meaningful relations with environmental information. This approach acknowledges that sustainability emerges not merely from data or technology, but through entangled relations between humans, technologies, and the broader environment.

Discussant: Rikke Hagensby Jensen  (Aarhus University)

Supervisors: Cecilia Katzeff, ABE School; Björn Hedin, ITM School; Rob Comber; EECS School