Identifying promising objectives for a sustainable HCI pattern language

Abstract

Sustainable HCI can still be considered a relatively young field; yet, it has seen a variety of recent contributions investigating previous approaches and raising questions on how to go forward. As such, the field would greatly benefit from an effort to summarize existing solutions, avoiding reinventing the wheel but also identifying blank spots of missing research. Design patterns offer such an approach. Established in the domain of architecture, successfully utilized to date in software engineering, and having been applied to a variety of areas in HCI, design patterns have a rich history from which the SHCI community can learn and use it to its advantage. We examine previous approaches of design patterns and based on those insights lay out a set of challenges and opportunities for their application to SHCI. As our analysis highlights, patterns can be geared towards recording knowledge or as a tool for outward communication, and given the state of the field, we believe the first objective is the more feasible and more promising starting point.