Sustainability and Children

Sustainability is a topic that has been explored from many different angles in HCI in the past years. In this project, we shift the perspective and take a look at environmental sustainability through the eyes of children. This project aimed at understanding how children represent and define environmental sustainability in the home with the use of the drawing-telling technique, as developed by Susan Wright (2007). In order to do so, we asked children (9 to 13 years old) to draw two houses. The first one is their current house. The second one is the most environmentally-friendly house they could imagine. Through discussions and descriptions of the drawings in term of sustainable actions and features, we were able to understand the extent to which children know about sustainability and how much is currently implemented in their home. This project served as a first step to inform the design of eco-visualization tools for children in the home.


Publications