Sustainable HCI and Encouraging Retrofitting

Sustainable HCI has seen a large growth in the amount of research taking place in the field. However, are we taking the most effective route to generating sustainable sustainability? In the Sustainable HCI community, a large focus of the research has been on persuasive psychological techniques to change individuals’ behaviours to be sustainable. Nevertheless, individual behaviour change has limited energy saving potential, and can be hard to sustain. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an area of research which has had limited focus so far in the Sustainable HCI community namely encouraging retrofitting of buildings to be more efficient and sustainable. This field has larger and more sustainable potential energy savings, but sets a unique challenge to the Sustainable HCI community which is very different in character from the traditional focus on everyday behaviours and habits, as retrofitting requires a considerable commitment, from both, individuals and society.