Making Practices in Pursuit of Ecological Ethos: Learnings from Three Ecovillages in Australia

Abstract

Ecovillages, communities in which people integrate self-built houses, shared facilities, organic farming, composting, and self-governance into everyday practices, serve as laboratories for ongoing experiments in sustainable living. While topics like sustainability, simple living, and making are well discussed in the HCI community, we aim to investigate what socio-environmental issues are identified in ecovillages and how and with which ethos makers address these issues in their making practices. In this paper, we present findings from an ethnographic investigation around sustainable making by focusing on the endeavours of three ecovillages and highlighting their ethos to draw out lessons for HCI researchers. We discuss the relationship between making practices and sustainability from four aspects: space, material, network, and meaning, and provide lessons and implications for the HCI community.

Keywords:

• DIY
• maker culture
• sustainability
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank all participants for their valuable time. Dr. Dhaval Vyas is supported by the Australian Research Council’s DECRA grant DE180100687.

Notes on contributors

Hongyi Tao

Hongyi Tao received his Master of Information Technology in 2020 and is currently working towards a PhD degree at The University of Queensland, Australia. Hongyi’s research interests include sustainable living, maker culture, and digital fabrication.

Dhaval Vyas

Dhaval Vyas is a Senior Lecturer in the Human-Centred Design discipline, School of IT and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on HCI, CSCW and Ubiquitous Computing, with specific attention to the maker culture research and supporting under-resourced communities.