Rely on Available Resources: Designing Sustainability Education Technologies for Low Resources Scenarios

The urgency of effectively delivering the message of sustainability challenges, such as climate change, and fostering social and individual change is vital. Sustainability Education plays a crucial role to empower young generations with knowledge, values, attitudes, and tools to deal with the climate emergency. The averseness and readiness of people to alter personal behavioral patterns to change the negative effects of the events is quite low. Still, most people carry on with their existing behavior, with many may be less inspired to act or to take it seriously. Resistance to change seems to be a very natural human response especially since “Equity, access to resources and technology, social and human capital, and access to risk-spreading mechanisms all function simultaneously as determinants of adaptive capacity and as prerequisites to sustainable development.”. This research aspires to innovate Sustainable Interaction Design (SIxD) in the specific field of Sustainability Education beyond the establishment of an experimental design-driven and human-centered discipline for motivating behavioral change through digital technologies. In particular, our research will contribute to evolve the SIxD field as it gathers data towards devising pervasive processes, educational platforms and tools that may catalyze societal transitions toward sustainability through design, i.e., how interactive systems can be used to promote more sustainable behaviors, as well as sustainability in design, i.e. how scarcity and optimization of resources can be used as critical lens in the design of digital technologies themselves. Since marginalized communities often lack the material means to successfully implement technology-enhanced learning, this research fosters an empirical perspective on intersectional design by assuring scalability of the solutions and graceful degradation in case of low resource educational scenarios. It thus assures Sustainability Education for all and prevents the overload of individuals, the isolation of groups and the break of community exchange.