Research project Regulating Environmental Sustainability: Encountering the Law in Designing for Waste Management
What are the regulatory challenges when designing new systems for waste management? The topic will be explored in this research project. Our aim is to expand the understanding of interactions between environmental sustainability, local regulations and digital innovation.
This project will provide scientific knowledge and practical methodological expertise to more responsively address regulatory challenges of designing new digital systems that enable sustainable waste practices.
Considering regulatory aspects early on, when new digital technologies are envisioned and designed, will more efficiently support the alignment of values mandated by the law with specific design features. It will also address the concerns that different stakeholders (for example municipalities and drivers of innovations) might have in managing waste and protecting the environment.
By focusing on the specific case of household waste management, this project will study the role of existing laws and regulations in mandating how processes of waste management, collection and disposal ought to be locally organized and complainant with environmental protection.
The project will illustrate the challenges connected to structuring such processes through commercial digital platforms, and explore new methodologies and practical strategies to integrate early on relevant regulatory frameworks into design processes.
Project description
The project will illustrate the challenges connected to structuring waste processes through commercial digital platforms, and explore new methodologies to integrate relevant regulatory frameworks into design activities. These analytical and methodological extensions will enable the uptake of environmentally sustainable solutions within urban contexts through early encounters between technology design, the law, and stakeholders’ (e.g., municipalities, policy-makers, agencies responsible for digital innovation or environmental protection, IT companies) values and concerns.
The project will advance:
- Empirical knowledge on how relations between digitally mediated environmental practices like waste management, laws, and local governance are configured, can become misaligned and contested.
- Understandings of the grounds and terms whereby legal disputes can be framed, when commercial digital technologies do not merely afford new actions (i.e., help to dispose of household waste), but challenge established municipal roles and responsibilities in the provision of central urban services.
- Accounts of the political dynamics, power relations or historical reasons that can shape how concerns for digital innovation gain legal attention, are framed, and contested.
- Accounts of the consequences that tensions between innovation and regulations can have both for the appropriation of digital technologies and the many actors involved in such legal disputes.
- Practical design methods and strategies to enhance the proactive role of the law in its regulatory and problem-solving functions. This contribution is needed to include the law and other regulations already in the design of new systems, instead of considering interactions with policies only after digital systems have been developed.
While specifically focusing on a waste management platform, the promised extension of the design process bears applied potential for other settings where understanding the interactions between environmental sustainability, local regulations, and digital innovation is pivotal to the diffusion of digital technologies.
This is particularly relevant as processes of digitalization are increasingly driven by private actors and IT companies (see Uber, Airbnb), often independently from city-planning strategies. The project’s results will help HCI and Law researchers, IT practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders to predict and analyse problems before they might arise – and not only when technologies are already in use.
Project members
Project managers
Chiara Rossitto
Senior lecturer
Members
Stanley Joel Greenstein
Universitetslektor, docent
