Sustainable Electronics and Devices

Sustainability has emerged as a central concern in contemporary society across numerous industries. In response, Sustainable HCI has emerged as a heterogeneous developing field of research driven by the aim to limit environmental consequences related to computing technology and to use computing to help support pro-environmental behaviors. The need to embed sustainability in the design of interactive systems, personal electronics, IoT devices, and other smart products is more apparent than ever. One way to enable sustainability in interactive human-computer interfaces is to reduce embodied carbon and toxic waste in the fabrication, usage, and disposal of smart systems, by advancing new developments in transient electronics, recyclable or retrievable hardware components, energy efficient mechanisms, and fabrication strategies that minimize resource consumption. Along with advances in fabrication techniques, biomaterials, and nanomaterials that offer a strong basis for breakthrough developments in sustainable design of interactive systems, the rise of reservoir, neuromorphic, and analog processing techniques are also providing a better suited platform for sustainable intelligence through low powered computation and allowing for the inclusion of non-binary data. These approaches have been proposed in both academic and commercial realms but have not made significant inroads into mainstream smart products.

This Research Topic seeks original, innovative contributions that tackle issues of sustainability in interactive systems, from materials, and manufacturing of devices, sensors, electronics, and processors to the broad hardware and software architectures necessary to implement these systems in practical applications, enabling integration with real world infrastructure necessary to make them commercially viable.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- Decomposable or degradable devices, sensors, processors, or communication components.
- Circular approaches to device manufacturing or electronics creation.
- Architectures and approaches to support non-CMOS processing.
- Devices and electronics based on recycled materials.
- Sustainable electronics and device fabrication methods.
- Sustainable approaches to communications and integration.
- Architectures and systems for real world integration of sustainable electronics.
- Low-powered software algorithms and hardware platforms that reduce the necessary energy used in today’s solutions.
- Design or simulation tools that aid with creating and evaluating sustainable devices and electronics.
- Integration of energy harvesting for sustainable functionality in the real-world environments.
- Natural and organic materials that enable a greater level of sustainability in interaction design and manufacturing.
- Carbon conscious design and fabrication of sensors, actuators, or processing systems.
- Human-computer or human-nature interfaces employing bio-inspired or bio-integrated processes or computational algorithm.

Keywords: Sustainable electronics, transient and degradable electronics, smart materials, circularity, low-powered computing, self-powered systems

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.