Out of control: reframing sustainable HCI using permaculture

Sustainable HCI research is often framed in terms of correction and control, such as designing persuasive technology to encourage individual behavior change or to optimize energy consumption. But as others have argued, correction and control-based approaches detach sustainable HCI from the sociotechnical realm, e.g., by oversimplifying the complexities of the social world and how they participate in unsustainable practices. Many agree that the sustainable HCI community needs to move beyond persuasion and behavior change-but how? In this paper, we introduce an alternative to the control paradigm. We turn to the philosophy of permaculture, which emphasizes working with nature rather than against it, as the control model does. Specifically, we present our fieldwork in contemporary agriculture in Taiwan, which experiments with permaculture-based approaches to agriculture, blending ancient traditions of farming with cutting edge technologies and philosophies. This work demonstrates how permaculture philosophy's alternative to the control model creates potential openings and new framings for sustainable HCI.