Beyond the Individual: The Contextual Wheel of Practice as a Research Framework for Sustainable HCI

Addressing human impact on the environment by focusing on shared everyday practices, rather than just individual behavior is an approach that shows promise. However, it can be challenging to put this approach into concrete use, especially in teams unfamiliar with the practice orientation. To support the practice approach, we introduce the Contextual Wheel of Practice (COWOP), a framework that can: 1) help researchers and designers to better understand practices, 2) design effective interventions, and 3) facilitate collaboration between team members from different disciplines, who may not be familiar with the practice orientation. We describe how COWOP was developed, and our experiences using COWOP in three different cases. We then position COWOP as part of the "turn to practice" in HCI, and discuss how it can be useful to HCI researchers and be applied in domains beyond sustainability, such as healthcare and privacy.