Investigating the Sustainability-Cybersecurity Nexus in HCI as a Practical Problem: Submission to Workshop WS27: HCI for Climate Change: Imagining Sustainable Futures

When being explored as a practical problem, ecological sustainability concerns conflict, align and coalesce with other substantial interests of HCI. In our analysis, we focus on the entanglement of sustainability and cybersecurity, i.e., on the cybersecurity-sustainability nexus. The growing attention to sustainability in HCI interventions and recommendations has so far been outward facing; addressing policymakers, administrators or users. By exploring sustainability as a practical problem this paper invites a new audience to the sustainability debate: HCI itself as a community of designers, developers and socio-technical engineers. We seek to develop further the inward-facing gaze that has recently emerged in (S)HCI by asking: how can the design of technologies and the socio-material practices they enable be crafted in a more sustainable manner? And, more profoundly, what is sustainability in the design, deployment and discarding of IT systems? Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss three ways in which sustainability and cybersecurity are entangled in practice: by design, by maintenance, and by hesitation.