SGER: Rethinking Drivers for IT: Lessons from a Newfoundland Fishing Village

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This project identifies implicit assumptions in contemporary IT design rooted in industrialized consumer culture through an ethnographic investigation of the arrival of broadband IT in Change Islands, Newfoundland, a remote, subsistence-oriented, working-class community with close ties to the environment. This exploratory work claims that the current drivers are inappropriately oriented towards a non-sustainable future, and the fresh perspective that a group of users whose particular needs and patterns of life are not well-known to IT designers can identify a more sustainable future for IT design. This project starts with the recognition that we must substantially rethink our relationship to the environment. The project develops an understanding of the marginal ties of this particular community to an industrialized consumer culture to highlight the aspects of everyday IT design which are predicated on industrialized orientations such as mass production and consumption of consumer goods and a disconnect with the natural environment. In response to this understanding, a design case book is developed to reflect a sustainable approach to human-computer interaction (HCI). Design directions that arise from taking Change Islanders? lifestyle and perspectives seriously contribute to the fundamental rethinking of IT practice which will be an essential requirement of sustainable HCI.