manner. For example, information about proper battery disposal could be made available near or at the end of the battery life.

2. Put opportunities in the environment. Resources for and information about sustainable phone actions should be made available where they will be most useful or most easily accessible. It is important to consider how to integrate opportunities for sustainable interactions in ways that leverage users’ everyday routines to lower the effort necessary to engage in such interactions and increase the likelihood of serendipitous opportunities for sustainable action.

3. Develop novel alternatives to disposal. To avoid the unnecessary discarding of functional devices and lessen the need for the production of new devices, it is important to find novel alternatives that facilitate the reappropriation of phones or their components to extend their lifetime and transition them into other roles to which they are suited. It is of value here too to consider how both design in the environment and design of the phone could support and encourage reappropriation.

4. Create reasons for keeping. The value and purpose of a device may change over time. In order to foster a longer lifespan, another challenge is to create reasons for users to keep a phone. Perhaps designs that foster a stronger personal connection to the phone or create long use will enable an aging device with declining value to continue to offer benefit to users. It may also be worthwhile to consider ways to design phones that “get broken in” over time, such that users actually derive explicit benefits from maintaining a phone for a longer period.

5. Support upgrading and extension. Along with opportunities for reuse and reappropriation, phones and their environments should offer novel and valuable ways of upgrading and extending the phones to reduce the need for complete replacement. This requires consideration of how to design a phone that can be easily stripped and reconfig-ured. For example, adding new hardware should become as simple as changing the skin of the phone and plug-and-play capabilities on a desktop computer.

Mobile phones present a particular challenge for sustainability because of their increasing ubiquity and frequent replacement. In considering how interaction design can play a role in reversing the tide of mobile phone e-waste, examining the problem through the lens of situated sustainability may open possibilities for solutions that go beyond our devices.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Elaine M. Huang is a researcher in the Social Media Research Lab at Motorola Labs. She recently completed a Humboldt Fellowship in the media computing group at RWTH Aachen University, where she began research on e-waste and sustainability. She received her Ph.D. in computer science with a focus in HCI from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She can be reached at www.elainehuang.com.

Khai N. Truong is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science. His research lies at the intersection of human computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, and focuses on usability and acceptance issues surrounding automated capture and context-aware applications. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. For more information visit www.cs.toronto.edu/~khai.

DOI 10.1145/1340961.1340966

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