As we look to the future through the lens of the new decade, we want to demonstrate how interaction design mines different contexts and geographies to improve our shared human condition. This year’s IxDD theme is Culture and Sustainability. This year’s theme challenges the interaction design community to explore their impact on culture and sustainability in their work, workplace, communities, and beyond. Questions that came up relating to this topic include:

• What does it mean to create a culture of sustainability?

• In our increasingly interconnected global community, how do we enable local cultures to be resilient and sustainable?

• What are our accountabilities as designers to ensure we are appropriately using our planet’s resources?

The theme is inspired by UNESCO’s Key Ideas around culture and sustainable development: “If achieving sustainability is first and foremost about making an appropriate use of the planet’s resources, then culture must be at the centre of our development strategies, since cultures frame people’s relationship to others in their society and the world around them, including the natural environment, and condition their behaviours.”