This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled w...

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Seven HCI Grand Challenges

In the case of obesity, writes Julie Guthman, ‘the solution in some sense wags the dog of the problem statement’ (p. 16). In this compelling book, Guthman offers a lucid account of the ‘obesity epidemic’ said to plague the USA. The book’s core argument is twofold: first, that obesity is an ecological condition, and second, that the political, sociocultural and economic dimensions of ecologies have been largely absent from both popular and scholarly discussions about obesity. At the outset, Guthman is clear that the book’s purpose ‘is not to falsify myths * or even necessarily to reveal another certain explanation’ in terms of the purported causes of weight gain trends (p. 16). This is what is perhaps most crucial about Weighing In. It is not another attempt to explain away the field of possible causes and feel-good solutions for weight gain, in favour of a magic bullet. To be sure, it is a well-researched book about public health, food systems and alternative food movements. But it is at its heart a book about capitalism, and as such offers health scholars of all methodological stripes an outstanding example of how to foreground the political. Conceptually, the book traces how late twentieth-century neoliberal ideologies permeated American socio-economic structures, and how the infusion of freemarket values into public goods shifted city planning, labour conditions, environmental regulations and agricultural policies. In this same space, Guthman argues, neoliberal ideals of self-governance, self-control, interpersonal competition and personal risk management transformed aesthetic values of thinness into matters of good health. This political ecological framework acknowledges that people may be getting bigger, but it also asserts that many definitions of the obesity ‘problem’ (often unintentionally) inhibit social justice and leave weight gain and its ‘logical’ fixes as foregone conclusions. If obesity is the material result of capitalism in neoliberal times, then we must reckon with how ‘bodies as material entities are literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption’ (p. 182). The book’s structure examines specific potential causes and consequences of obesity. Chapter 2 asks how we know obesity to be a problem, and unravels the politics of body mass index that underlie the medicalisation of body size. Chapter 3 examines some of the discursive threads that constitute the notion of ‘healthy lifestyle’, namely the concept of ‘healthism’ as an ideology that pins the responsibility for good health onto individuals. Guthman contextualises healthism Global Public Health Vol. 7, No. 8, September 2012, 911 913

Weighing in: Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism

The food sovereignty policy framework seeks to eliminate hunger and malnutrition. Multiple definitions of food sovereignty exist; proponents have yet to agree on a single set of policy proposals.1 With Food Sovereignty: Towards Democracy in Localized Food Systems, Michael Windfuhr and Jennie Jonsén find common ground among various interpretations of food sovereignty and offer a policy agenda. Windfuhr and Jonsén’s analysis of the sources of hunger and malnutrition is compelling, and the authors convincingly explain the shortcomings of traditional responses to these problems. They are not persuasive, however, when arguing that food sovereignty is currently the most effective framework for addressing hunger and malnutrition. Windfuhr and Jonsén begin Food Sovereignty by describing the severity of global hunger and malnutrition. Although enough food is produced to feed the entire world population, 850 million people are hungry and malnourished.2 Windfuhr and Jonsén focus on the suffering of smallholder farmers3 and the rural poor, who comprise nearly three-fourths of the world’s hungry.4 The authors predict that hunger and malnutrition will only increase as absolute global demand for food begins to surpass global supply.5

Food sovereignty: towards democracy in localized food systems - responding to a changing environment.

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The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era

This paper provides further insight into the usefulness of smartphones and dedicated GPS devices for collecting current travel survey data. GPS and accelerometer time series for 33 European research project PEACOX study participants are available for analysis; these were tracked simultaneously with smartphones and dedicated devices for 8 weeks. Meaningful diaries can be extracted from both data sources. However, if high resolution data is needed, results suggest that dedicated GPS devices are still relevant; they have no battery issues, meaning that more data is recorded and that data quality is more stable.

Comparison of Travel Diaries Generated from Smartphone Data and Dedicated GPS Devices

This paper presents a novel application of participatory design fiction for sustainable domestic energy consumption. In our study we examine how social practices relate to a newly developed energy management system introduced to households. We explore how design fiction can be used to identify current design limitations and to showcase future design directions to overcome these limitations. In particular, we investigated how energy consumption feedback is leaving users in a state of "helplessness" despite raising awareness of their environmental impact. Through participatory fictional future story-writing workshops we identified five levels of empowerment that design for sustainability practitioners can engage with. Our proposal is to use those levels of empowerment to reframe sustainable design by shifting from behaviour to social practices and from awareness to empowerment.

From Awareness to Empowerment: Using Design Fiction to Explore Paths towards a Sustainable Energy Future

This paper introduces the concept of 'food democracy' as a theoretical framing for HCI to engage in human-food interaction. Extending existing foci of health and environmental sustainability, food democracy requires thinking through aspects of social and economic justice, and democratic governance as directions for the study and design of technologies for alternative food movements. To exemplify food democracy, we report on field observations and interviews about the opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of local food networks with communities in deprived neighbourhoods using an online direct food marketing platform. Using a food democracy framing, we identify tensions around environmental, social, and economic goals; challenges of local food businesses operating within the existing economic paradigm; and differing perspectives on ownership and governance in the network. We discuss the need for HCI to design for systems change and propose a design space for HCI in supporting food democracy movements.

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Food Democracy in the Making: Designing with Local Food Networks

Persuasive technologies are suitable for encouraging green transportation behaviour towards CO 2 emissions reduction. For example, such technologies can guide and support users in finding trips that cause low emissions and in the long term change their behaviour and habits towards more sustainable transport decisions. In this paper, we focus on persuasive strategies supported by a choice architecture approach and incorporated in a smartphone application, aiming at providing urban travellers with a solution that will influence them to consider the environmental friendliness of travel modes while planning a route. We focus specifically on the persuasive strategies of Reduction, Tailoring, Tunnelling, Cause-andEffect Simulation and Suggestion. The choice architecture approach leverages routing options and results of a commercial routing engine in order to provide proper default options as well as filter and structure the results according to user preferences and contexts while emphasizing environmentally friendly routes. Our approach is integrated in a route-planning assistant for everyday use that is implemented for Android mobile phones and follows a client‐ server architecture. An evaluation with 24 participants using the system for 8 weeks showed good acceptance of our approach, increased environmental impact awareness, and qualitative comments also conveyed instances of behavioural change.

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Watch your Emissions: Persuasive Strategies and Choice Architecture for Sustainable Decisions in Urban Mobility

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Sebastian Prost

Papers

Comparison of Travel Diaries Generated from Smartphone Data and Dedicated GPS Devices

From Awareness to Empowerment: Using Design Fiction to Explore Paths towards a Sustainable Energy Future

Food Democracy in the Making: Designing with Local Food Networks

Watch your Emissions: Persuasive Strategies and Choice Architecture for Sustainable Decisions in Urban Mobility

A grand challenge for HCI: food + sustainability