Developing Sustainability Competencies Through Design Work in an Introductory Human Computer Interaction Course

Practice Paper Recommended citation: Jaradat, B., & Krogstie, B. R. (2025). Developing Sustainability Competencies Through Design Work in an Introductory Human Computer Interaction Course. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17632040. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Developing Sustainability Competencies through Design Work in an Introductory Human Computer Interaction Course B. Jaradat a, 1 , B. R. Krogstie b a Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 0000-00032852-1679 b Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 0000-00029998-1894 Conference Key Areas: Sustainability and society in Engineering, Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: Sustainability, Education, Human Computer Interaction, Sustainability Competencies, Sustainability Awareness Framework, Design Process ABSTRACT Human Computer Interaction increasingly considers sustainability as an aspect of professional practice. This needs to be reflected in the education of future practitioners. In introductory Human Computer Interaction (HCI) education, sustainability analysis can be considered an element of the design process and a building block for acquiring sustainability competencies. While there is a growing body of research on sustainable HCI, knowledge about the meaningful integration of sustainability in the design process is still limited. In HCI education, further exploration is required to investigate the integration of sustainability in the design process. The research presented in this paper explores how students conduct sustainability analysis as part of an educational intervention targeted the integration of sustainability analysis in the design process in an introductory HCI course. By use of a sustainability awareness framework, the students collaboratively addressed possible impacts of their design on various dimensions of sustainability. Sustainability effects and their interrelationships were modelled in a diagram (Sustainability Awareness Diagram). An observational study in six student teams was carried out to closely observe how students use the sustainability framework and how the sustainability analysis activity supports the students’ sustainability learning and contributes to sustainability competencies. Findings showed that the students demonstrated understanding of sustainability as well as showed some relevant sustainability competencies. The study 1 Corresponding Author B. Jaradat [email protected] provides insights on how to meaningfully integrate sustainability in design-based courses. 1 INTRODUCTION With growing attention to, and critical demand for, sustainability considerations in the design of software, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) education could be a key arena for future professionals to develop relevant sustainability competencies. There is however a lack of structured approaches to incorporate sustainability in HCI education. Sustainability analysis can be considered a useful step in a user centered design process. An integrative approach, whereby sustainability is incorporated as an aspect of the design work, might offer wide opportunities to acquire and practice sustainability skills. This research gap is targeted in our research. In a large introductory HCI course, sustainability analysis has been integrated in the design process using the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) (Duboc et al., 2019). In the study presented in this paper, the main objective is to explore how the activity of conducting a sustainability analysis fosters students’ development of sustainability competencies. The following research questions guided the study: RQ1: How can the incorporation of sustainability analysis as a step in the design process help students learn about sustainability? RQ2: What sustainability competencies do students acquire through sustainability analysis as a step in the design process? The paper is organized as follows: Section II provides a brief background for the study. Section III outlines the research method. The results are presented in Section IV and discussed with implications and conclusions in Section V. 2 BACKGROUND The twenty-first century has witnessed a noticeable orientation to integrating sustainability in education. In technology-related fields, comprehensive literature reviews and roadmaps have surveyed the major exerted efforts e.g. (Alarcon-Pereira et al., 2023) in engineering education, (Peters et al., 2024) and (Moreira et al., 2024) in computing education. Research on industry needs revealed a lack of sustainability understanding among IT professionals, where industry experts reported the need for comprehensive understanding of sustainability, a set of sustainability skills and tools to integrate sustainability in products and processes (Moreira et al., 2024). Other research efforts have focused on specific fields and geographic settings. For example, in her very recent literature review, Gardelle (Gardelle, 2025) reviewed the tendencies for integrating sustainability in Engineering education in Europe. The preparation of students for the future involves the development of sustainability competencies (Wiek et al., 2011), which according to the definition by Wiek et al., are complexes of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that facilitate problem solving in relation to sustainability problems. Defining key sustainability competencies has a crucial role for successful teaching (Wiek et al., 2011), especially when operationalized by being translated into learning outcomes (Wiek et al., 2015). Some questions are still open in literature and practice, one of which is conveying sustainability competencies within pedagogy (Wiek et al., 2011). Examples of key sustainability competencies include systems thinking (the ability to analyse complex systems across different domains and scales), anticipatory (the ability to analyse and evaluate future scenarios), normative (the ability to evaluate sustainability values and ethics), and more (Wiek et al., 2011), (Redman & Wiek, 2021). Finding a balance between technical and sustainability skills is required by educators (Gardelle, 2025). Knowledge about sustainability competencies are of significance for educators, helping them focus on opportunities for students to develop necessary competencies (Beagon et al., 2023). The research presented in this paper explores the role of sustainability analysis as part of integrating sustainability in one of the important domains of computing education, namely HCI. A comprehensive review of research trends and gaps in the area of sustainability in HCI was made by (Hansson et al., 2021). Sustainability has also been researched in specialized sub-areas of HCI, such as in Sustainable Interaction Design (SID), which was introduced as a concept in 2007 (Blevis, 2007), where sustainability is considered as a guiding principle throughout the design process. A comprehensive study (Besana et al., 2024) presented the evolution of SID, emphasizing sustainability as an ongoing learning process, in which designer and stakeholders are all engaged. A recent study explored how design thinking fosters sustainability competencies among students (Ardila Echeverry et al., 2025). Studies have also shown the role of awareness in supporting designers’ learning about sustainability (Issa & Isaias, 2022). In the context of software development, sustainability assessment frameworks have been developed to raise awareness on the possible impacts of designed solutions on sustainability. This includes the Sustainability Assessment Framework (SAF) (Lago et al., 2024) and the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) (Duboc et al., 2019). The study presented in this paper made use of SusAF (Fig. 1), which has gained momentum as a requirements engineering approach supporting sustainable development (Bambazek et al., 2023), (Betz et al., 2024). SusAF has been applied in some educational settings e.g. (Bambazek & Groher, 2024), (Krogstie & Krogstie, 2020). The framework consists of several elements, the major of which is the Sustainability Awareness Diagram (SusAD), which incorporates five sustainability dimensions identified in the Karlskrona manifesto (Becker et al., 2015) as being foundational in systems design. The dimensions are the individual, society, environment, economy, and technology (Becker et al., 2015). Across these, sustainability impacts are identified along three orders of effects on the time dimension: 1) immediate: direct effects of the solution 2) enabling: effects that emerge over time, and 3) systemic: persistent changes that are observable over time. In addition to identifying effects, chains of effects are identified, i.e. effects leading to other effects. As part of the framework, a set of guiding questions is provided to help participants identify sustainability effects on the various dimensions. Despite the growing body of research on sustainability in higher education, key gaps remain. For instance, there is limited research on integrating sustainability in HCI education. This includes approaches whereby sustainability analysis is considered part of the design process undertaken by students in experiential and typically projectbased learning. To address this gap, a research project was initiated by the authors as an attempt to implement sustainability in an introductory HCI course by incorporating sustainability analysis as a step in the design process. The work presented in this paper explores the use of the sustainability framework and the relevant sustainability competencies. Fig. 1. Sustainability Awareness Diagram (SusAD) – Adopted from (Duboc et al., 2019) Fig. 2. SusAD created by a group of students in our study 3 METHODOLOGY The study presented in this paper is part of a project integrating sustainability in an introductory HCI course in collaboration with the teaching staff. The following sections introduce the case, i.e. the course setting and the research methodology. 3.1 Course setting The course under study is an introductory level HCI course of 7.5 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System ECTS. The students in the course belong to various study programs, including Computer science. In the HCI course, the students work in groups on a project addressing a provided design case, in which the requirements for an application have been coarsely outlined. For example, in the semester of the study, Spring 2024, the case was about designing a user interface for a mobile application facilitating sustainability activities at a university campus. The students submit their coursework through five assignment deliverables during the semester. In the semester where our study took place, the students were introduced to the concept of sustainability and the use of the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) in a 45-minute course lecture. The second assignment in the course was the main target of our sustainability intervention. The assignment included sustainability analysis as a step in the design process being conducted after the development of personas and storyboards. The student groups generally worked on sustainability diagrams in digital versions, using a simple PowerPoint template. 3.2 Participants During the lecture focusing on sustainability, which was delivered by the second researcher, the announcement was made about the observational study. Teams recruited for the study would get the additional advantage of working on a physical diagram. They would also get help from the researcher when needed. Additionally, the value of participation as a contribution to education research was pointed out, and participants received token gift cards. The first six groups showing interest were assigned time slots, one hour each, for their work with the sustainability diagrams. Each group had four to five students from different programs of study. The work was conducted in English, the common language between the students and the researcher. Whereas the students are not native English speakers, they were content to use English in their work on the diagrams and gave the impression of communicating with ease during the work sessions. 3.3 Research Methodology The study is an exploratory case study. Given that the course is a large one and the process followed by students is not visible to us as researchers, this study aims to explore how students apply the sustainability analysis framework, and whether this work supports the acquisition and use of basic sustainability competencies. For this purpose, we conducted participant observation of six student teams. The research project was approved by the national research approval body in the institution’s country. Informed consent was obtained from each of the participating students. One of the researchers (First author) conducted the observation and the analysis. 3.3.1 Data Collection In the observed sustainability analysis sessions, the students largely worked independently from the researcher, collaborating and making use of relevant course material for process support. The researcher provided a general introduction to the task and was available for answering questions at need. The study took place in a working environment that facilitated the group work and included all the required material (SusAD printed out on A1 cardboard, copies of the design case, the SusAF guiding questions, the information consent, post-its, pens, in addition to the researcher’s required material (e.g. recorder)). The sessions were audio recorded. Additionally, the researcher made notes. To guide the note taking, a set of predetermined criteria were applied as indicators of students’ understanding of sustainability. The criteria focused on students’ ability to: 1) identify impacts on different dimensions of sustainability (environment, society, economy, individual, and technical), 2) categorize the impacts according to the order of effect (immediate, enabling, or systemic), 3) distinguish positive and negative impacts, and 4) collaborate as a group to reach a decision. Beyond this, the researcher aimed to be open to any other emerging aspect of the students’ work of relevance to the research objectives. The collected data from the study consist of the students’ work (SusAD diagrams), audio recordings, photos of SusAD diagrams, and the researcher’s notes. 3.3.2 Data Analysis The audio recordings were fully transcribed and qualitatively analysed following the thematic analysis framework by Braun and Clarke (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The transcribed dialogues and the photos of the diagrams were organized and coded in the software tool NVivo. The codes included the four predetermined criteria. The complete set of codes were categorized into broader themes, one of which (understanding sustainability) largely covered the findings associated with the predetermined criteria, and the other (sustainability competencies) was recognized as largely addressing sustainability competencies as described in the research literature. Quantitative content analysis (Gheyle & Jacobs, 2017) was conducted to quantify the identified impacts in the resulting diagrams (SusAD diagrams). 4 RESULTS The major objective of this study was to observe if the students get foundational understanding of sustainability and develop sustainability competencies. Key findings are presented in this section, underpinned, when relevant, by excerpts from the data material. In each excerpt, the student is identified by Sgx, where S refers to Student, g is the group number, and x is to identify each student within the group. 4.1 Sustainability Understanding Through RQ1, we aimed to investigate if the students get understanding of sustainability by being engaged in a sustainability analysis step in the design process. The observation revealed that sustainability analysis using SusAF helped students understand the concept of sustainability. This was apparent in the students’ ability to identify and correctly classify the sustainability effects of the mobile application. The average number of effects identified by each group across the five dimensions was 24 (a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 28), with a variation in the number of effects identified in each dimension. In all the groups, the largest number of identified effects were on the individual dimension. The economic dimension got the smallest number of effects by four out of the six groups. The students were also able to identify the time dimension of the effects, with some confusion sometimes arising between the enabling and the systemic levels. Most of the identified effects were on the enabling time dimension as identified by five out of the six groups. An example of a sustainability effect is thinking about privacy problems that might arise due to some technical features, such as GPS, as in the following example: S2a: regarding the GPS tracking, although it is supposed to be activated by the user and only when in the campus, but I still feel that it is privacy. As for assigning sustainability effects to the relevant dimension or order of effect, there were some cases of confusion, which, in most cases, was resolved by the students through discussion. The following is an example.: S1b: what do you think? Is it systemic? S1c: it doesn’t happen overnight, but also not at the very long-term. S1b: so, enabling? The students were able to identify chains of effects as in the following example: S1b: maybe we can say “greener areas”. S1a: this will lead to less CO2. An observation was that the framework helped the students focus on the effects and describe them using appropriate terms. Examples include circular economy, trust, consumer awareness, among several other examples. The ability of SusAF to help in understanding sustainability was facilitated by several factors, including the set of guiding questions and the SusAD visualization. All the groups started by brainstorming and discussing the potential effects without use of the questions. Later, they consulted the SusAF questions. For example, one of the groups were looking to explore more examples of technical effects. By referring to SusAF questions, they discussed extensibility as an example of the potential technical effects. S1a: then, if the app is now developed for Android, after 10 years, it might not be available for other platforms! 4.2 Sustainability Competencies The main pedagogical approach in the course is to have the students learn through hands-on experience from HCI design work. By engaging in a design process, reflecting and receiving feedback from peers and teaching staff, the students gradually develop relevant competencies. Sustainability competencies were not explicitly taught in the course, but they were relevant to the sustainability analysis work and might be practiced there. Our observations of the sustainability analysis conducted in the six student groups indicate that basic sustainability competencies were applied. We recognize four of the key sustainability competencies described in (Wiek et al. 2011): Systems thinking was apparent in students’ ability to consider effects and their relationships to the broader system. For example, one group, who were planning an app about exchanging used items among students, discussed technical aspects (e.g. security), effects on the user (e.g. financial savings), the society (e.g. trust between users in relation to the exchanged items), the economy (e.g. less production), and the environment (e.g. less pollution due to reduced waste and less use of resources). The groups also discussed chains of effects, considering whether the effects were positive/negative, their dimension, and their temporal order (i.e. immediate, enabling, or systemic). The following chain of effects is an example extracted from students’ conversation and resulting diagram: reuse (enabling individual, positive (reduced spend)) → less production (enabling economic, positive (circular economy) and can be negative (reduced financial gains for producers)) → less waste (enabling environment, positive) → less CO2 (systemic environment, positive). In many of the groups, anticipatory competence could be seen in students’ evaluation of longer-term impacts and thinking about future scenarios. This included imagining a big success of the app resulting in behaviour change: S1a: this is a big hit. That is more like a social change. One of the groups discussed a future scenario representing the possibility of some workers losing their jobs, which also points to a normative competence as they considered a societal value showing empathy towards affected workers. The normative competence was mainly shown through discussing ethical implications. For example, one of the groups discussed the mutual trust in the exchange process. Interpersonal competence could be observed through the group dynamics, more specifically in students’ collaboration on developing the diagrams, which involved clarifications, the integration of multiple viewpoints, and reaching agreement. The following discussion about trade-offs in the use of a secure identification system illustrates this: S4c: logging in by <university’s identification system>…you don’t get other participants S4b: I am also thinking that other users will not be able to use …, which is negative. S4a: it can also be security. 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Our study explored a key part of a pedagogical design applied in a larger educational design research project aiming to incorporate sustainability analysis as a step within the design process. This connection to the real work of HCI design facilitates a meaningful educational experience for the students, thus addressing one of the major gaps reported in the literature about the limitations of the existing educational approaches to integrate sustainability (Peters et al., 2024). Moreover, identifying what key sustainability competencies are considered critical to be possessed by students is a major concern (Wiek et al., 2011). This study is exploring if students can apply basic sustainability competencies in introductory HCI course. In the students’ sustainability analysis group work, we observed sustainability understanding as well as the use of sustainability competencies. This answers our research questions RQ1 and RQ2. In line with the high-level course objectives of learning by engaging in HCI design practice, the learning process is being supported by sustainability analysis as a design-related activity and simultaneously a learning activity. Our study shows that it is possible in an introductory course to gain a basic understanding of sustainability and its dimensions, apply basic sustainability competencies, and practice the use of an existing sustainability framework - all of which recognized as necessary for professionals in industry (Moreira et al., 2024). The use of an established sustainability-relevant framework broadens the possibility for educators who, in developing a pedagogical design, may rely on existing insights about the use of the frameworks in design practice. Our study confirms recent findings from the developers of the SusAF framework (Betz et al., 2024) underpinning that a strength of SusAF is the simplicity of the visual representation. The way the students in our study demonstrated sustainability understanding through their work on the diagram suggests that SusAF is appropriate also in an introductory course. This study contributes to pointing to SusAF as a pedagogical tool that contributes to developing sustainability competencies. This can assist in resolving part of the issues faced by educators and raised in research (Wiek et al., 2011) on teaching sustainability competencies, and aligns with studies confirming that developing sustainability competencies is a way for an effective integration of sustainability (Sattich et al., 2024). Further elaborating on the findings from the observation, we suggest that the sustainability analysis as grounded in the HCI design process involves a set of steps: • Contextualize: The students are introduced to the HCI design case to understand the requirements as a basic step to think about relevant sustainability aspects. • Design: the students conduct a scaffolded sustainability analysis, e.g. using a sustainability awareness framework, as a step in the design process. • Construct: The sustainability diagram is used in later stages of the design process. • Collaborate: This is a supporting element that permeates the whole process. The students’ collaboration through the teamwork contributes to each phase. In planning for the incorporation of sustainability analysis, these steps cultivate a gradual development of sustainability competencies. Furthermore, as the main steps in a design process and the use of SusAF for sustainability analysis are not specific to HCI, we believe that consideration of similar steps is relevant to the inclusion of sustainability in design-oriented courses in general. This aligns with the role of designbased learning in reinforcing sustainability competencies (Ardila Echeverry et al., 2025). A sustainability analysis framework like SusAF aids the design process while helping scaffold the learning process through structure and contextualization. Further work along this line of research should include empirical studies going into more detail on the sustainability analysis as part of a design process with a strong connection to sustainability competencies. A limitation to the study presented in this paper is the sample size, i.e., six student groups. A larger set of groups might have led to observations expanding on or deviating from our findings. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank the teaching staff of the course and the participating students. This study is part of a larger research supported by Excited (Center for Excellent IT Education), which is funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir).