What We Speculate About When We Speculate About Sustainable HCI

Fears of climate change and the escalating impacts of environmental damage are growing, and recent papers in the area of Sustainable HCI have called for urgent, non-linear solutions to these problems. Speculative design, along with related approaches including design fiction, have been taken up as means of navigating the "wicked problems" that structure contemporary nature/society relations. We conduct a survey of speculative design papers published in ACM venues between 2008 and 2021, assessing fundamental questions such as who is involved in the process, how is sustainability framed, and how is speculation used. Our evaluation of this body of work yielded mixed results; we find both promising trends as well as notable and problematic limitations in how the HCI community is taking up speculative practice in this domain. We build upon this evaluation to offer four provocations to designers seeking to use speculative practice in support of sustainability goals.