Sustainable Innovation in Practice: Documenting the Processes, Methods and Perspectives of Low-Tech Designers

Sustainability is becoming a key focus in HCI. The low-tech design approach, emerging outside traditional HCI frameworks, focuses on creating simpler artifacts, fostering user autonomy, and minimizing environmental impacts. Although it offers a tangible route toward sustainability for citizens and industry, low-tech design practices remain largely undocumented. Understanding how practitioners conceive and build low-tech artifacts can inform broader sustainable efforts in HCI. We investigated low-tech design processes through interviews with 14 French low-tech makers, focusing on concrete examples and completed projects. Our contributions include (1) a practice-based scoping of the low-tech concept (2) an account of the unique aspects of the low-tech approach to design for sustainability (3) an analytical description of three core low-tech perspectives — Durability, Sobriety, and Autonomy — and their integration into design processes. By critically reflecting on low-tech perspectives for the design of sustainable socio-technical systems, this work opens a dialog between low-tech practice and design research.