In line with the shift towards a more experience-centered paradigm in product and service design, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is seen as an important enabler of immersive, and potentially transformative digital experiences. As such, ICT has a huge potential to address fundamental human needs (e.g., experiencing pleasure, relatedness); to tackle “slow-change problems” (e.g., adopting a sustainable lifestyle) and to keep up important social functions also in times of crisis (e.g., distance education, communication, entertainment) through experiences. However, two non-negligible downsides of ICT are its potential negative impact on wellbeing (e.g., addiction, blurring online/offline identities), and its growing ecological footprint, with ever-increasing demands to satisfy the Quality of Experience (QoE) of increasingly spoiled users.

On this background, this Dagstuhl Seminar sets out to discuss the topic of “Quality of Sustainable Experience”, and hence the challenge of how to transform existing physical and digital experiences into more sustainable (ideally fossil-free), yet human-centered and well-appreciated ones. It aims to bring together experts from different fields addressing the multi-faceted topic from their own perspective, using their distinct tools and methods. The main goals are to foster new alliances, inspire, trigger scientific renewal, as well as to identify future opportunities and research challenges through a hands-on approach using selected innovation research methods. The seminar is expected to identify and disseminate (tangibly in form of a position paper and a video trailer), how experiences – as the main selling point of products and services – in various ICT-related domains can be made more sustainable, and how the quality and degree of sustainability of such experiences can be evaluated and be better understood.

The seminar integrates the three main areas ICT, sustainability and QoE, and deliberately adopts a bottom-up approach. We are looking forward to contributions in, but not limited to the following areas:

• Sustainability of ICT, and potential of ICT to contribute to more sustainable experiences in other sectors (e.g., methodologies, best practices, design techniques, standards);
• Experience design, design for sustainability, design for change and corresponding design processes;
• Insights, analysis, visualisation (e.g., methodologies to evaluate and quantify the ecological footprint of ICT products, services, networks at different levels);
• Know-how on how to assess sustainability and on how to evaluate sustainable experiences;
• Business and policy-related aspects (e.g., sustainable business models; policies that steer towards the more sustainable design and use of ICT).

These contributions could be statements and reports by the participants in various formats (abstracts, commented presentations, short movies, etc.), addressing the kinds of experiences the participants work with, how their work relates to sustainability, which methods and approaches they bring to the seminar, and what trends and issues they would like to see to be addressed?

The seminar will be run in a hybrid mode, uniting remote participants with those on spot. As far as possible, the planning of the seminar will take different time zones of the participants into account. Thus, it would be important to know about the wish for remote participation at the earliest convenience.

Creative Commons BY 3.0 DE

Katrien De Moor, Markus Fiedler, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, and Alexander Raake