Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities, and Marine Systems Laura J. Perovich Catherine Titcomb Tad Hirsch l.perovich@northeastern.edu titcomb.c@northeastern.edu tad.hirsch@northeastern.edu Northeastern University Northeastern University Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts, USA Boston, Massachusetts, USA Boston, Massachusetts, USA Brian Helmuth b.helmuth@northeastern.edu Proteus Ocean Group Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts, USA ABSTRACT Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well- being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping re- view to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded through- out the broader SHCI literature and to fnd new research opportu- nities. We identify several themes that could beneft from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change im- pacts and adaptation strategies. Finally, we discuss opportunities for further work on marine human-natural systems research in SHCI and interdisciplinary collaboration with marine science and coastal communities. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interac- tion (HCI). KEYWORDS sustainable HCI, SHCI, sustainable interaction design, marine sys- tems, oceans, environment, Sustainable Development Goal 14 ACM Reference Format: Laura J. Perovich, Catherine Titcomb, Tad Hirsch, Brian Helmuth, and Casper Harteveld. 2023. Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities, and Marine Systems. In CHI’23: Confer- ence on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3544548.3581291 1 INTRODUCTION Earth’s oceans provide a wide array of benefts to people, ranging from food to recreation to spiritual well-being [45]. Approximately Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI’23, April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9421-5/23/04. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581291 Casper Harteveld c.harteveld@northeastern.edu Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts, USA half of all the world’s atmospheric oxygen comes from ocean plants and phytoplankton, and over 3 billion people rely on the ocean for their primary source of protein [104]. Approximately 40% of the world’s population live within 100km of the coast, and are at risk from a range of threats from climate change such as coastal fooding. The łblue economy” contributed by the ocean is currently estimated at $1.5 trillion USD annually and could reach $3 trillion USD by 2030 [69]. From the viewpoint of biodiversity, the oceans comprise 70% of the earth’s surface and 95% of its total living space, yet an estimated 90% of ocean species have yet to be classifed [65]. As historian Naomi Oreskes [72] notes, ignoring the oceans in an era of ongoing climate change is no longer a viable proposition, as evidenced by the 2021 launch of the United Nations’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which directly addresses UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, Life Below Water. HCI has a history of working on important environmental is- sues through subfelds such as sustainable HCI (SHCI). Work in this space has become increasingly interdisciplinary as HCI ex- pands beyond a largely technology-centered focus and considers the complex ways that issues are contextualized in the world [11]. SHCI researchers have worked on a variety of sustainability is- sues, such as energy consumption, air pollution, the depletion of natural resources, and climate change more broadly. Yet a recent review paper speculates that the feld may not be well positioned to contribute to the important environmental issues around marine systems. Hansson et al. note that it is ła challenge to see how HCI could substantially contribute to SDG 14, Life Below Water (‘Con- serve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development’)” as they łbelieve there is less of a match between this specifc goal (SDG 14) and the methods and tools that HCI researchers have at their disposal” [38]. This spec- ulation has not been investigated in depthÐthough others have repeated it in the SHCI literature [87]Ðand requires scrutiny given the importance oceans, coastal communities, and marine systems play now, and certainly in the future. 1 For our efort, we take SDG 14 as a starting point because the SDGs have emerged as a guiding 1 "Coastal communities" typically refers to human communities on shorelines and so would not be encompassed by "ocean". "Marine systems" would include open ocean and shallow coastal (non-human) habitats/ecosystems. Because we are interested in how humans "interact" with oceans we include coastal communities in our discussion of marine systems and thus use this term as encompassing everything that directly and indirectly has to do with Life Below Water, as specifed by SDG 14.