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DIY Homes: Placemaking in Rural Eco-Homes

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

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Abstract

Eco-home makers are permaculturists, artists and environmentalists who actively engage with the environment and nature in order to build self-made, sustainable homes. Through the conceptual lens of “placemaking”, we draw on an ethnographic study of eco-home makers and focus on unpacking important lessons for sustainable HCI research. Engaging with 15 eco-home makers in rural Australia and China, we aim to develop an in-depth understanding of how and why they design, build and retrofit their eco-homes. Our findings show that eco-home makers apply a material-first approach, align their designs with nature and are influenced by sociality and everydayness of making. We conclude by discussing how such insights can deepen our understanding of placemaking and DIY in HCI, and open up new avenues for future design and research of computing tools to empower residents as place-makers, enabling them to make their own living environments sustainable.

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Acknowledgments

We thank all our participants for their valuable time. Dr. Dhaval Vyas is supported by the Australian Research Council’s DECRA grant DE180100687.

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  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Hongyi Tao & Dhaval Vyas

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  1. Hongyi Tao
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Correspondence to Dhaval Vyas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Tao, H., Vyas, D. (2021). DIY Homes: Placemaking in Rural Eco-Homes. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12934. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85613-7_25

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