New paper: Carbon Scales – Collective Sense-making of Carbon Emissions from Food Production

At the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Martin Lindrup presented the paper “Carbon Scales: Collective Sense-making of Carbon Emissions from Food Production through Physical Data Representation” written by Martin Lindrup (Aalborg univeristy) together with Arjun Menon and Aksel Biørn-Hansen at KTH. The paper got an honorable mention at the conference, which is great!

Below is the abstract of the paper and here is the reference and link to the open access publication:

Martin Valdemar Anker Lindrup, Arjun Rajendran Menon, and Aksel Biørn-Hansen. 2023. Carbon Scales: Collective Sense-making of Carbon Emissions from Food Production through Physical Data Representation. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1515–1530.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596043

Abstract

The climate impact of our food consumption is a key issue to sustainability. Yet understanding the food system and the impact it has can be difficult given its abstract nature. In this paper, we report on a Research through Design project aimed at designing and evaluating a data physicalization for supporting collective sense-making of the climate impact of food. Throughout the design process, we have explored the materiality of CO2 emissions and ways to design with less resource use. The resulting data physicalization, Carbon Scales, was evaluated in a three-week field study with 27 participants. Our findings show that collective sense-making can be enabled through interactive data physicalizations and that this can lead to carbon literacy. We expand on a) sustainability through design by arguing for the value of artifacts that let people stay in the interaction as this can support collective sense-making and b) sustainability in design by showcasing the value of designing with an interaction-first and materials-second mindset.