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Following the approval of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, sustainability became a hotly debated topic. In order to build a better and more sustainable future by 2030, this agenda addressed several global issues, including inequality, climate change, peace, and justice, in the form of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that should be understood and pursued by nations, corporations, institutions, and individuals. In this thesis, we researched how to exploit and integrate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Data Visualization to promote knowledge and awareness about SDG 8, which wants to encourage lasting, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. In particular, we focused on three targets: green economy, sustainable tourism, employment, decent work for all, and social protection. The primary goal of this research is to determine whether HCI approaches may be used to create and validate interactive data visualization that can serve as helpful decision-making aids for specific groups and raise their knowledge of public-interest issues. To accomplish this goal, we analyzed four case studies. In the first two, we wanted to promote knowledge and awareness about green economy issues: we investigated the Human-Building Interaction inside a Smart Campus and the dematerialization process inside a University. In the third, we focused on smart tourism, investigating the relationship between locals and tourists to create meaningful connections and promote more sustainable tourism. In the fourth, we explored the industry context to highlight sustainability policies inside well-known companies. This research focuses on the hypothesis that interactive data visualization tools can make communities aware of sustainability aspects related to SDG8 and its targets. The research questions addressed are two: "how to promote awareness about SDG8 and its targets through interactive data visualizations?" and "to what extent are these interactive data visualizations effective?".

Interconnected computational devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) context make possible to collect real-time data about a specific environment. The IoT paradigm can be exploited together with data visualization techniques to put into effect intelligent environments, where pervasive technologies enable people to experience and interact with the generated data. In this paper, we present a case study where these emerging areas and related technologies have been explored to benefit communities, making their members actively involved as central players of such an intelligent environment. To give practical effect to our approach, we designed and developed a system, named Smart Campus, composed of: i) an infrastructure made of sensors to collect real-time data in a University Campus, and ii) a rich web-based application to interact with spatio-temporal data, available in a public interactive touch monitor. To validate the system and grasp insights, we involved 135 students through a survey, and we extracted meaningful data from the interactive sessions with the public display. Results show that this Campus community understood the potential of the system and students are willing to actively contribute to it, pushing us to better investigate future scenarios where students can participate with ideas, visualizations/services to integrate into the web-based system, as well as sensors to plug into the infrastructure.