Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services: The Case of YouTube

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Recent research has advocated for a broader conception of evaluation for Sustainable HCI (SHCI), using interdisci- plinary insights and methods. In this paper, we put this into practice to conduct an evaluation of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) of digital services. We explore how SID can contribute to corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategies. We show how a Digital Service Provider (DSP) might incorporate SID into their design process and quanti- tatively evaluate a specific SID intervention by combining user analytics data with environmental life cycle assessment. We illustrate this by considering RUclips. Replacing user an- alytics data with aggregate estimates from publicly available sources, we estimate emissions associated with the deploy- ment of RUclips to be approximately 10MtCO2e p.a. We estimate emissions reductions enabled through the use of an SID intervention from prior literature to be approximately 300KtCO2e p.a., and demonstrate that this is significant when considered alongside other emissions reduction interven- tions used by DSPs.
Chris Preist, Daniel Schien, Paul Shabajee