There have been repeated calls for more ecological approaches to Sustainable HCI, and for the inclusion of the sociopolitical, structural, historical, and geographical aspects that shape technology-mediated practices of sustainability. Contributing to this discourse, and drawing from scholarship on Law and IT, this paper explores how the law, technology design, market mechanisms, and social norms enable and constrain behaviours — that is, how they regulate them. We use these modalities to discuss two digital technologies: a gig-work platform mediating practices of waste transportation, and an eco-visualisation platform scraping sustainability reports of publicly listed companies. The analysis expands on the set of dynamics that characterise the relations between these practices of sustainability, technology design, and regulation. We conclude by discussing the relevance of this conceptualisation for HCI, specifically in defining the roles of designers as regulators, and regarding design for sustainability as constituted through varying entanglements of these modalities.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) presents profound regulatory challenges, as emerging technologies often outpace traditional legislative frameworks. This article critically examines the European Union’s AI Act as a case study in regulating AI, highlighting the inherent tension between the law’s stability and the need for flexibility in governing innovation. The AI Act employs a risk-based approach, categorising AI systems according to their potential societal risks and introducing a multifaceted regulatory governance structure incorporating statutory, administrative, and outsourced legislative policy models. The study identifies key challenges arising from this fragmented regulatory approach, including legal uncertainty, inconsistencies, and concerns over political accountability. Through a comparative analysis of four legislative policy models—statutory, administrative, judicial, and outsourced—the article argues for an administrative model centred on a dedicated EU AI Agency. This proposed model aims to balance regulatory adaptability with legal certainty by consolidating expertise, ensuring procedural clarity, and strengthening accountability. By outlining a refined governance structure, this research offers a preliminary blueprint for a more coherent regulatory framework for emerging technologies, particularly AI.

This one-day workshop explores how encounters with regulatory aspects, before, during and after design, can shape the production of more sustainable futures. Within CSCW and Sustainable HCI, there have been repeated calls to develop more systemic approaches to design that include the political, institutional, and infrastructural aspects underpinning technology-mediated interventions towards sustainability. This workshop targets these calls by drawing attention to the methodological, analytical, and design challenges of considering regulatory and policy-making aspects that can shape both the design and the processes of designing digital technologies. It will be an opportunity to bring together CSCW, Sustainability, Law and other interested scholars, representatives of public institutions, environmental collectives, and diverse actors interested in investigating the "knots" of relations between technology designs, regulatory aspects, and sustainable practices. We plan to accept up to twenty contributions and run the workshop on-site.

When designing with and for complex sustainability processes like waste management, it is crucial to understand digital technologies as entangled with broader systemic factors, including physical infrastructures and regulatory instruments. Within the case of organic household waste management, this pictorial aims at making such relations visible through design methods. We have used yarn to represent the different threads of these entanglements and defined specific configurations: tangles, knots, loose ends, and frayed threads. We discuss how the design practice of giving form to these entanglements can make complex relations between digital technology, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments more visible and actionable for HCI, and explore how digital technologies are – and can be – made to work within them.

We demonstrate the construction of robust counterfactual explanations for support vector machines (SVM), where the privacy mechanism that publicly releases the classifier guarantees differential privacy. Privacy preservation is essential when dealing with sensitive data, such as in applications within the health domain. In addition, providing explanations for machine learning predictions is an important requirement within so-called high risk applications, as referred to in the EU AI Act. Thus, the innovative aspects of this work correspond to studying the interaction between three desired aspects: accuracy, privacy, and explainability. The SVM classification accuracy is affected by the privacy mechanism through the introduced perturbations in the classifier weights. Consequently, we need to consider a trade-off between accuracy and privacy. In addition, counterfactual explanations, which quantify the smallest changes to selected data instances in order to change their classification, may become not credible when we have data privacy guarantees. Hence, robustness for counterfactual explanations is needed in order to create confidence about the credibility of the explanations. Our demonstrator provides an interactive environment to show the interplay between the considered aspects of accuracy, privacy, and explainability.

The study of law and information technology comes with an inherent contradiction in that while technology develops rapidly and embraces notions such as internationalization and globalization, traditional law, for the most part, can be slow to react to technological developments and is also predominantly confined to national borders. However, the notion of the rule of law defies the phenomenon of law being bound to national borders and enjoys global recognition. However, a serious threat to the rule of law is looming in the form of an assault by technological developments within artificial intelligence (AI). As large strides are made in the academic discipline of AI, this technology is starting to make its way into digital decision-making systems and is in effect replacing human decision-makers. A prime example of this development is the use of AI to assist judges in making judicial decisions. However, in many circumstances this technology is a ‘black box’ due mainly to its complexity but also because it is protected by law. This lack of transparency and the diminished ability to understand the operation of these systems increasingly being used by the structures of governance is challenging traditional notions underpinning the rule of law. This is especially so in relation to concepts especially associated with the rule of law, such as transparency, fairness and explainability. This article examines the technology of AI in relation to the rule of law, highlighting the rule of law as a mechanism for human flourishing. It investigates the extent to which the rule of law is being diminished as AI is becoming entrenched within society and questions the extent to which it can survive in the technocratic society.