Auditing a frontier claim: separating evidence from projection

The previous unit took one frontier apart; this one names the audit that does it. A research frontier is announced as a future that research has already begun to reach. It carries three things: a measurement, an inference, and a projection of what the measurement implies. This unit argues that a frontier claim mixes measurement with projection. The audits which matter convert one part of the claim into a checkable number: a material cost, the distortion a study imposes on what it measures, or the intellectual inheritance a vision carries. An audit with a number can be wrong, and that capacity is what makes it evidence.

A frontier claim carries a measurement, an inference and a projection

Ens and colleagues report seventeen research challenges for immersive analytics, developed by twenty four international experts at CHI 2020 (Ens et al., 2021). Read as a measurement, it reports what a group of experts believes is hard, not whether the technology will deliver.

The projection is clearest when the authors flag it. Tomlinson and colleagues argue for collapse informatics, sociotechnical systems built in an abundant present for a future of scarcity, saying the transformation could begin within the next half-century (Tomlinson et al., 2012). In the same paper they state that imminent collapse is far from certain: the anatomy in miniature, a projection with a spread of possibility attached.

Audit one: putting a number on the material cost

Blevis opened the line the audits inspect. He defines design as choosing among future ways of being. He proposes a rubric for an artefact's material effects in terms of use, reuse and disposal, and sets out principles for sustainable interaction design (Blevis, 2007). This gives the audit its object: the material life of an artefact whose owner cannot afford to replace it, which a global average hides.

DiSalvo, Sengers and Brynjarsdottir made the field countable. They analysed empirically how sustainable HCI defines itself from a corpus of published works, and identified established genres, unrecognised intellectual differences and emerging issues (DiSalvo et al., 2010).

Brynjarsdottir and colleagues used that object to name a distortion. Reviewing persuasive sustainability research from 2009 to 2011, they argue that persuasion rests on a limited framing of sustainability and behaviour. Treating sustainability as the optimisation of a simple metric, they add, makes technology an objective arbiter over complex issues (Brynjarsdottir et al., 2012).

Freitag and colleagues put the share of global greenhouse gas emissions attributable to information and communication technology at 1.8 to 2.8 per cent. They argue that adjusting for truncation of supply-chain pathways raises it to 2.1 to 3.9 per cent (Freitag et al., 2021).

Audit two: the distortion the study imposes on what it measures

A frontier that claims the field study is stronger evidence than the laboratory must answer the distortions its own method creates. Brown, Reeves and Sherwood examined field trials through a trial of trials and documented three problems. The first is demand characteristics, where users adjust their behaviour to fit the expectations of those running the trial. The second is the interdependence of how a trial is run and the result it produces. The third is dependence on the insights of a subset of participants (Brown et al., 2011). The distortions are named precisely enough to be checked, and they apply to the field and interview work the sustainable HCI reviews count.

Audit three: naming the intellectual inheritance

Dourish and Bell explore the vision that drove the ubiquitous computing programme and the practices that grew from it. Much talk about ubiquitous computing, they argue, rests on unexamined assumptions about technology, space, culture and the future. They make the case for a ubicomp of the present (Dourish and Bell, 2011). The future was already imagined by someone. Ogbonnaya-Ogburu and colleagues (2020) bring critical race theory into HCI. They argue that racism is pervasive in everyday sociotechnical systems, and that the community is prone to interest convergence, in which a concession to inclusion has to benefit those already in power. They carry the argument by telling personal stories, using narrative as method rather than as decoration.

Dourish and Mainwaring make the inheritance explicit as a debt. Ubiquitous computing carries a universalising scope, they argue, linked to a colonial intellectual tradition of projects that unite scattered elements into one conceptual whole. They set out strategies for decolonising its research methodology (Dourish and Mainwaring, 2012).

Rogers supplies the retrospective form. Context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring and tracking dominated ubiquitous computing, she argues, but they do not match Weiser's world. The field should therefore move from proactive computing to proactive people (Rogers, 2006). Naming an inheritance changes what the claim is about.

Auditing the audit: did the field change?

Two reviews come closest to auditing the audits. Knowles, Bates and Hakansson note that more than a decade into sustainable HCI the community still lacks a shared understanding of sustainability and clear aims and metrics. They align the commonalities they find with an external account of a path to a sustainable future (Knowles et al., 2018). Bremer, Knowles and Friday, from two corpora fifteen years after the subfield emerged, find shifts towards research that is diverse and holistic but also away from addressing the urgent climate crisis. They posit that sustainable HCI took on more than it could deliver (Bremer et al., 2022).

Contested question: is a critique of a vision evidence, or only argument?

The interpretive camp holds that a critique is evidence when it changes what a field can build and know. Dourish and Bell and Dourish and Mainwaring audit assumptions rather than outcomes (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Dourish and Mainwaring, 2012). Frauenberger argues that entanglement with digital technology generates ontological uncertainties, epistemological diffusion and ethical conundrums that require evolving the research paradigm. He develops Entanglement HCI from four perspectives (Frauenberger, 2020). Nicenboim and Oogjes trace the decentring of the human from critical posthumanism into design scholarship and distil five emerging dimensions of practice. The critique has therefore produced methods (Nicenboim et al., 2025).

The measurement camp holds that without a number a claim cannot be contradicted. A claim that cannot be contradicted cannot be learned from (Freitag et al., 2021; Brown et al., 2011; Ens et al., 2021).

What would settle it is an attention audit with a comparison. Knowles and colleagues and Bremer and colleagues ran its first form, the re-reading of a field's own corpus, and their disagreement is the evidence. One finds the field converging on an external narrative, and the other finds it diversifying while turning from the urgent crisis (Knowles et al., 2018; Bremer et al., 2022). Neither fixes its coding before reading and neither compares against a field that did not receive the critique, so whether critique moves practice stays open. The study that would close it names one critique, fixes the coding in advance, and compares what the field cited before and after.

The strongest counter-argument sits inside the material. Freitag and colleagues' two ranges overlap, so the number is an estimate and not a fact. Dourish and Mainwaring argue that uniting scattered elements under one conceptual whole is the very inheritance the audit is meant to expose. An audit demanding a single number may therefore repeat the move it criticises. Frauenberger holds that some uncertainties are ontological and not measurable (Freitag et al., 2021; Dourish and Mainwaring, 2012; Frauenberger, 2020). The reply is that an audit naming its scope is the opposite of a totalising metric: a number that states what it excludes can be refuted.

The evidence divides by instrument. The interpretive camp rests on conceptual arguments and on a literature review that distils five dimensions of practice, and its product is a method rather than a number. The measurement camp rests on a review of emission estimates, on a trial of trials and on an expert challenge list. Neither camp has run the audit that would test whether a critique changes what a field builds. While the dispute is open, a designer should separate the measurement from the projection in a frontier claim, and ask for the number that could be wrong.

Where the argument is heading

Nicenboim and Oogjes show a philosophical position becoming five named design dimensions. Bremer and colleagues show a field review ending in a proposal rather than a verdict. Ens and colleagues show the challenge list still at work as a coordination device (Nicenboim et al., 2025; Bremer et al., 2022; Ens et al., 2021). The next step is the attention audit named above. Until it exists, the honest ending is the pair of sentences Tomlinson and colleagues wrote (Tomlinson et al., 2012).

The sources this unit rests on

Each note states what the cited document did and what it found. Every DOI was resolved and its record read on 1 November 2026; where the record carried an abstract, the abstract is the source of the note.

• Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention and disposal, renewal and reuse. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240705 Defines design as choosing among future ways of being, proposes a rubric for an artefact's material effects in terms of use, reuse and disposal, and sets out principles for sustainable interaction design.
• DiSalvo, C., Sengers, P. and Brynjarsdottir, H. (2010). Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/1753326.1753625 Reports an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI defines itself from a corpus of published works, identifying established genres, unrecognised intellectual differences and emerging issues.
• Brynjarsdottir, H., Hakansson, M., Pierce, J., et al. (2012). Sustainably unpersuaded: how persuasion narrows our vision of sustainability. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/2207676.2208539 Critically analyses persuasive sustainability research from 2009 to 2011 and argues that persuasion rests on a limited framing of sustainability and behaviour, and that treating sustainability as the optimisation of a simple metric makes technology an objective arbiter over complex issues.
• Tomlinson, B., Silberman, M. S., Patterson, D., et al. (2012). Collapse informatics: augmenting the sustainability and ICT4D discourse in HCI. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/2207676.2207770 Introduces collapse informatics, sociotechnical systems built in an abundant present for a future of scarcity, arguing the transformation could begin within the next half-century while stating that imminent collapse is far from certain.
• Rogers, Y. (2006). Moving on from Weiser's vision of calm computing: engaging UbiComp experiences. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. doi:10.1007/11853565_24 Argues that context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring and tracking dominated ubiquitous computing but do not match Weiser's world, and that the field should move from proactive computing to proactive people.
• Brown, B., Reeves, S. and Sherwood, S. (2011). Into the wild: challenges and opportunities for field trial methods. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979185 Examines field trials through a trial of trials and documents demand characteristics, the interdependence of how a trial is run and what it produces, and dependence on a subset of participants.
• Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262015554.001.0001 Explores the vision that drove the ubiquitous computing programme, argues that much talk about ubicomp rests on unexamined assumptions about technology, space, culture and the future, and makes the case for a ubicomp of the present.
• Dourish, P. and Mainwaring, S. D. (2012). Ubicomp's colonial impulse. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. doi:10.1145/2370216.2370238 Argues that ubiquitous computing carries a universalising scope, links it to a colonial intellectual tradition of projects that unite scattered elements into one conceptual whole, and sets out strategies for decolonising the field's research methodology.
• Knowles, B., Bates, O. and Hakansson, M. (2018). This changes sustainable HCI. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174045 Notes that more than a decade into sustainable HCI the community still lacks a shared understanding of sustainability and clear aims and metrics, and aligns the commonalities it finds with an external account of a path to a sustainable future.
• Freitag, C., Berners-Lee, M., Widdicks, K., et al. (2021). The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: a critique of estimates, trends, and regulations. Patterns. doi:10.1016/j.patter.2021.100340 Reviews peer-reviewed estimates of ICT emissions, puts the current share at 1.8 to 2.8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, argues that truncation of supply-chain pathways raises it to 2.1 to 3.9 per cent, and finds that not all sector pledges meet climate targets.
• Ens, B., Bach, B., Cordeil, M., et al. (2021). Grand challenges in immersive analytics. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411764.3446866 Reports seventeen research challenges for immersive analytics, developed by twenty four international experts at CHI 2020, to coordinate future work.
• Frauenberger, C. (2020). Entanglement HCI the next wave? ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. doi:10.1145/3364998 Argues that the field's entanglement with digital technology generates ontological uncertainties, epistemological diffusion and ethical conundrums that require evolving the research paradigm, and develops Entanglement HCI from four perspectives.
• Bremer, C., Knowles, B. and Friday, A. (2022). Have we taken on too much? A review of the sustainable HCI landscape. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3491102.3517609 Draws on two sustainable HCI corpora fifteen years after the subfield emerged, finds shifts towards more diverse and holistic research but also away from addressing the urgent climate crisis, and posits that the subfield took on more than it could deliver, proposing Green Policy informatics.
• Nicenboim, I., Oogjes, D., Biggs, H., et al. (2025). Decentering Through Design: bridging posthuman theory with more-than-human design practices. Human-Computer Interaction. doi:10.1080/07370024.2023.2283535 Traces the decentring of the human from critical posthumanism into design scholarship, reviews how it is practised in HCI, distils five emerging dimensions, and concludes that decentring through design is a material practice through which designers make knowledge.
• Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I. F., Smith, A. D. R., To, A., et al. (2020). Critical race theory for HCI. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3313831.3376392 Imports critical race theory into HCI, arguing that racism is pervasive in everyday sociotechnical systems and that the community is prone to interest convergence, where a concession to inclusion has to benefit those in power. It uses personal stories as its method.