Author: AdrianFriday

/ 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

/ AdrianFriday

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.

ARINZRIT digital research infrastructure sustainability report published!

/ AdrianFriday

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

/ AdrianFriday

Delighted to have the opportunity to talk about our fairer and more sustainable gig economy work.

We talk about the gig economy workers’ experience based on a mix of innovative online methods. We uncover how much they’re paid, what their experience and knowledge of the city is. Plus end with some ideas about how we could create better, fairer and more sustainable work for this growing group of workers. With implications for platform developers, cities, logistics companies and policy makers.

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

Digital Futures Distinguished Lecture on ICT Impacts

/ AdrianFriday

Was delighted to be hosted by Digital Futures @ KTH in Sweden, especially the fantastic folks at Sustainable Futures Lab in Media Technology and Interaction Design (funded by Digital Futures’ excellent Scholar in Residence Programme).  As part of this, I got to do a talk on estimates of ICT’s impact and my thoughts on the narratives embedded in this (will efficiency and green energy save ICT from its impacts, is it exceptional and does it enable carbon savings in other domains?). Check it out on YouTube.  My sincere thanks to my hosts for being exceptionally supportive, passionate and kind – and of course for all the Fika and sustainability discussions!