Designing for Digital Environmental Stewardship in Waste Management

Waste management in urban areas is a complex process, encompassing a variety of activities (e.g., acquiring, sorting, disposing), actors (e.g., single individuals, waste collectors, condominium associations), and capacities (e.g., from household recycling stations to physical infrastructures such as recycling and sorting facilities). Whereas previous HCI design research has tackled problems with waste management from an individual, behavioral change perspective, we approach this design space through a feminist ecological design perspective of Digital Environmental Stewardship. Through a combination of qualitative empirical data and materials generated at design workshops, we outline challenges related to waste management in a complex of fve multi-apartment buildings. We propose a number of design explorations addressing such challenges, and refect on the generative role of the DES framework in framing design from a collective and ecological perspective.