Enjoyed the chance to talk to the interesting folks at MobiUK on mobile computing and sustainability. I attempted to reconsider the role of ‘resource efficiency’ not as a driver of growth of ICT’s impacts on the planet, but rather to work within planetary limits. Digital technology unquestionably transforms our understanding of the world and helps society reconfigure itself to do new things from better healthcare, climate science, self-driving cars and smart cities, and more. Yet, I argued, ICT has significant direct impacts on energy material systems, and an exponentially growing footprint. As researchers, innovators and practitioners, what should the MobiUK community be doing to help bring about a more environmentally sustainable future? The slides are available.
Author: AdrianFriday
Enjoyed doing talk to inspiring group (Ekologi brez meja – ecologists without borders) in Slovenia on Building digital solutions for the Anthropocene: avoiding digital wastefulness (talk on YouTube). Key points: how the infrastructure we build into the tools we use everyday, e.g. building AI into search, is leading to growth in energy demand, data centres and materials. Plus the need to look systematically at energy systems, IT, water and material resources and how they do and will impact the environment and society in the future.
No planet B, interactions blog post on sustainability, HCI and academic practice
Writeup reflecting on the themes from our panel at CHI 2023 on sustainability in HCI (at last!). The panel were myself, Ann Light, Jason Tarl Jacques, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Kathrin Gerling, Robert Soden, Gözel Shakeri, and we were enabled by the SIGCHI sustainability committee and chair Nicola J. Bidwell, Vishal Sharma, and Neha Kumar. We talk about the need to exercise all our agency (in our research and our academic practice), to recognise the embedding of drivers of unsustainability, and the need to embed and encourage sustainability focused work.
Talk: Metabolising the Planet, UCLIC talk @ UCL, 9th October
Thoroughly enjoyed talking with the excellent folks at UCLIC at UCL on 9th October on the growing and multidimensional impacts of adopting ‘environmentally and energy expensive’ ICT in research and beyond. They asked great questions 🙂 The slides are online and you can find the actual talk on YouTube.
Talk: Where’s the value in energy data science?
Thoroughly enjoyed talking about the missing context to energy data time-series with the good folks at Keele in software & systems and Digital Society. Check out the slides.
Enjoying the Pentland Centre for Sustainability ‘transforming tomorrow’ podcast series
Really interesting series of podcasts exploring sustainability in business and sustainable infrastructures. There’s even an episode this week by your truly on ICT and its impacts.
Infinite growth without environmental impact?
Delighted to see our short article in the IES’ Environmental Scientist magazine making the case for ‘climate proportional computing’ is now available as open access!
ARINZRIT digital research infrastructure sustainability report published!
UK research increasingly relies on ‘digital research infrastructure’ (DRI): digital technologies and computational facilities from laptops to high-performance computing and large-scale data archives. DRI has an energy and carbon impact as a result of performing computational work (emissions scope 1), the energy needed to drive them and how this is generated (scope 2), and their manufacture and disposal (scope 3). In our report, we outline our key findings and offer recommendations for more sustainable DRI policy and practice. Our recommendations also demonstrate that interventions should not just be technical, but also to training, procurement and research culture! Read more: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7966424.
Logistics Chaire Intl Seminar on 9th November on fairer and more sustainable last mile parcel logistics
Delighted to have the opportunity to talk about our fairer and more sustainable gig economy work.
This was part of a 1/2 day event coordinated by Dr. Laetitia Dablanc, Logistics City Chair at University Gustave Eiffel, Paris. Note that they publish a range of fascinating surveys and data relating to logistics, gig workers and e.g. warehouse distribution, see:
http://lvmt.fr/en/chaires/logistics-city/
Agenda:
- Introduction by Jonathan Sebbane (Sogaris) and Laetitia Dablanc (Logistics City Chair)
- Anne Goodchild (University of Washington) – Bringing curbs to light; estimating the value of digital curb availability data
- Adrian Friday (Lancaster University) – FlipGig: Digitally transforming deliveries and collections in the gig-economy
- Matthieu Schorung (Université Gustave Eiffel) – Geography of warehouses in the United States and spatial patterns of Amazon warehouses
- Giacomo Lozzi (Università degli studi Roma TRE) – Improving stakeholder engagement for urban logistics: the L-3D project
- Travis Fried (University of Washington) – New spatial patterns for e-commerce warehousing and implications for equity
- Heleen Buldeo Rai (Université Gustave Eiffel) – Proximity logistics and how warehouses can become good neighbors
SIGCHI blog post on reducing academic air travel published
Is it time to question the carbon intensity of academic travel? How will we reduce this footprint in line with the ‘Carbon Law’ to work within 1.5 degrees ambitions? Some thoughts on this in a new blog post published today on medium.