Welcome to the Socio-Digital Sustainability (SDS) research team website. We are an inter-disciplinary group based in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University.

Our research focuses on three primary areas:
1) exploring and understanding everyday practices (like watching TV or cooking), and how they relate to resource demand and other impacts. In particular, we focus on three impact-intensive domains: food, media and IT, and thermal comfort;

2) understanding how infrastructures (e.g. digital network, logistics, energy) are expanding rapidly due to the demand from our digitally mediated lives, medium term solutions (e.g. collaborative logistics, dynamic allocation of resources in digital infrastructure), and how expansion poses serious challenges in the face of climate change, limited capacity and resource scarcity;

3) working with policy makers to enable more sustainable living trajectories. This work focusing on campus energy, digital infrastructure and last-mile logistics.

We use a mixed-methods approach to understanding everyday practices, impacts and infrastructure use: quantitative measures such as energy consumption and activity using physical sensors, combined with qualitative accounts of experiences, actions, and meanings using interviews and diary exercises. These understandings give us a platform to interrogate and shift practices in more sustainable directions, as well alongside an in depth knowledge base that enables discussion with policy makers about future scenarios.

Keywords

ubicomp, hci, sustainability, social practice, logistics, digital infrastructure demand, end use energy demand, food, data demand, impact of ICT, transport, responsible computing, policy