Announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency

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Invitation to a dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October 2024)

I've had an interest in the role of the court jester for years and invited others (researchers, artists, whistleblowers and more) with whom I have discussed this ("friends of the court jester") to a dinner in October last year. Someone gave me a tip to check out this artist, Lars Noväng, and I found his website "Frihetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Freedom Service"), which is a hilarious upside-down inside-out version of "Arbetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Employment Service", see image below). 

"The Swedish Public Freedom Service provides an interactive internet platform as well as temporary offices, where ritualistic and bureaucratic behavior in pursuit of freedom can be performed. 

In this way the Freedom Service offers Swedish citizens a useful alternative to the mandatory search for non-existent or imaginary jobs on today’s shrinking labour market they otherwise are required to perform.

Besides supplying and mediating freedom, the Freedom Service runs a R&D Program and also has an obligation to influence the public opinion. 

From 2019 the Swedish Public Freedom Service also has the mandate to oversee and control the level of freedom in Swedish companies and organisations, as well as in public places"

So I invited Lars to join the dinner and he graciously accepted despite knowing basically nothing about who I am and what the dinner was about (he was in fact the only guest that I had not met beforehand). We didn't really have time to talk at the dinner and decided to meet up later (and this belatedly happened only a month ago) and have met twice more since then - including this past week. Lars and I have so many shared interests, but we also inhabit/play different roles in our daily lives (researcher vs artist) and at times also have different perspectives on the same phenomenon. Even when we both want to explore the same phenomenon, we might have very different start points and fall back on different methods.

Lars has however recently started a new project (together with fellow artist Johan Forsman), "Ritkontoret" (Rite Agency), with a focus on making institutionalized behaviors (that can be seen/framed as rites and rituals) visible, understand how they affect and limit us, develop ways of seeing the world from new perspectives, and explore other ways of living (by inventing new rites and rituals). The Rite Agency is an artistic initiative that examines how art can drive societal change through rites and rituals (both unveiling those that exist around us but that aren't recognised as such) and by inventing new rites and rituals that make us think and question that which is taken for granted.

So after a very stimulating meeting at a café a month ago, I got a lot of new ideas and sent over a list with half a dozen concrete suggestions for how we could cooperate. Since me and my colleague Elina now have a platform (a research group, SF Lab (homepage, blog that will migrate elsewhere soon), a master's programme and several different courses), we have several things we can bring to the table, including collaborating in some form around a course. We have just started to explore how we could cooperate, and the discussions themselves are very stimulating - so I'm personally totally content already as-is!

One possibility would be to recruit one or more students who would do their master's thesis with the Rite Agency as client a year from now (equivalent to how many KTH students have companies as clients for their master's theses). Exactly what such a thesis would investigate remains to be seen/specified (and it could be that we can't figure it out and nothing will come of it). But that's just one of several ideas and I'm pretty sure something will be realised this year. What's great with a thesis is that (from my perspective) the Rite Agency would be a client and a site where a student could write a very interesting thesis. The fact that a student would do a thesis with the Rite Agency and whatever comes out of it would be folded into their art project and be presented as "results", so it's a win-win for both us and them. 

So this blog post is basically just a teaser for thing to come - since we are currently exploring different ideas and trying to figure out if/how they could be realised and how each party could benefit from such a cooperation. The great thing here is that the Rite Agency (Lars and Johan) have funding from a call, "Creativity, fantasy and imagination", that allows them to (as far as I understand), do pretty much whatever they deem to be interesting to their project without having specified it in advance. This allows them a large degree of freedom to decide how and where to explore rites and rituals (for example at KTH and in cooperation with us). It also seems to be totally ok for them to take risks and to fail when they explore something - as long as they fail in interesting (unexpected, unpredictable) ways - and make something out of it. Like documenting the failure and tying the outcome back into their artistic work, or using failure as input to explore whatever it was that was revealed in the process - which then perhaps turns out not to have been a failure at all, but the only thing that could have happened... 

Lars often creates something that doesn't exist - except he pretends it does and then makes it happen (like creating the Swedish Public Freedom Service or like me announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency). When something that has been magicked-into-existence (for example an agency) meets, interacts or possibly collides with people, their ideas, their feelings and with various structures in society, the artistic explorations start. How do people react, what do they think and what do they make out of it? Instead of asking for permission or trying to get a permit, you just make it so and observes what happens (which bears similarities to a Research through Design approach). Or something like that - that's just my interpretation and I have surely misunderstood or misrepresented something since this all doesn't come to me intuitively because I might be too much of a researcher, craving more structure even when I think/fantasise/innovate. This is also why it's interesting to continue to work with and try to understand artistic practices in general and Lars' ideas and methods in particular. 

Dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October last year)

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Monthly report for special freedom to start over 

("månadsredovisning för särskild nystartsfrihet")

Books I've read (Dec - mid-Feb)

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I read books. I exclusively spend the time on my daily commute reading books, and I on average read between two and three non-fiction books per month (my performance goal is to read 25 pages (or more) per weekday and another 25 pages per weekend, for a minimum of 150 pages per week). 

I usually cluster 3-5 books that touch on some specific topic into a "batch", because reading books that relate to a topic and to each other creates a "conversation" between the books I read and it enhances my experience and my learning. The topic of the batch of books I write about below is "collapse" (or the threat/spectre of societal collapse). 

I've in fact published more than 55 blog posts about "books I've read". They used to be a regular feature on the blog and the first such post was published in December 2010 and the latest concerned books I read during the first half of 2017 (but the blog post was published one year later, so I had a year-long backlog of writing about books that I had read). Each blog post always refers back to the previous such blog post so it should be possible to track them all down by following a daisy-chain that travels backwards in time.

Let's say I published all of these 55 blog posts between 2011-2017 (a 7-year long period) and that I published no such blog posts between 2018-2024 (again a 7-year long period). Let's further assume that I on average reported on reading four books in each blog post. That would mean that I read ≈ 220 books during a period of 7 years, or around (or possibly slightly more than) 30 books per year. It could also be that I have read upwards to another 200 books since 2018. I could probably track all or most of them down since I carefully note what day I started and what day I finished reading a book inside the book itself. I might do that - but I'm not going to write blog posts about all books that I have read during the last 7 years! I will however write about books that I read from now on, starting with these four books about "collapse":

Ugo Bardi's book "Before the Collapse: A guide to the other side of growth" (2020) treats a serious topic but does so with wit, wisdom and humor. The starting point of the book is the "Seneca curve" (or the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff"), i.e. the idea that growth is slow, but collapse is rapid :

    

     

Roman Philosopher Seneca stated that "It would be some consolation [...] if all things would perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid". So "collapse" is "a rapid, uncontrolled, unexpected, and ruinous decline of something that had been going well before" (p.x). Bardi's book is a contribution to the under-researched questions of how things fall apart (a relationship, a company, a nation or a civilisation), i.e. it's a contribution to the non-existent "science of collapse". Over time, most things fall apart and when it's time, one problem leads to another, many things gang up and go bad all at once and collapse ensues. But collapse does not always need to be something that is only bad:

"The basic idea of the Seneca strategy is that the attempts to stave off collapse tend to worsen it. [A] useful skill derived from the Seneca strategy is how collapse can be exploited to get rid of old and useless structures, and organisations. [...] You probably have in mind your government, but it is also possible to think of much smaller systems: plenty of people try to keep their marriage together beyond what's reasonable to do and in many cases divorce, the collapse of a marriage, is the best options. But a company may also become unfit to survive in the market, burdened by obsolete products, outdated strategy, and unmanaged organisation. Bankruptcy is the way we call collapse in this case and, again, it is a way to start again from scratch." (pp.xii-xiii).

The book is full of witty, clever ideas and formulations and it's a treat to read it! Instead of raving about the book, I'll just add a few more quotes from it. If these don't convince you to read the book, then nothing I say will:

"Compulsive gamblers face [a Seneca cliff that] may start from one of the windows of an upper floor of the casino building." 

"Typically, models telling people that they have to change their ways are the most likely to be disbelieved or ignored."

"Monetary insolvency is just a quantified version of breaking a promise."

"Fictionalized catastrophes are surely less threatening than those that are described as likely to happen for real. [...] it may be that the only way for our mind to cope with possible catastrophes to come is to see them as fairy tales."

"The reason why depletion [is] neglected in the debate is [...] the human tendency to discount the future, in other worlds to think that an egg today is better than a chicken in the future."

I thought I would like Jim Bendell's "Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse" (2023) since I very much liked his previous (edited) book "Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos". But I didn't like it very much and it has something to do with the author's voice and his tone throughout the book. As apart of Bardi (above), Bendell takes himself very seriously and it at times feels like he is a zealot and that he believes he is the only person who knows the truth. 

That doesn't mean there aren't many things that are interesting in the book and the first half (chapters 1-7) discuss economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, food collapse and societal collapse. I found the chapter about food collapse particularly frightening with it's enumeration of six global trends that work in parallell, that strengthens each other and that spell bad news for humanity (all 8.2 billion of us); 1) we are hitting biophysical limits of food production, 2) we are poisoning or destroying the biosphere that agriculture depends on, 3) current food production relies on declining fossil fuels, 4) climate chaos is constraining food production, 5) food demand is growing rapidly (and can't easily be reduced) and 6) the industrial food system prioritises efficiency and profits over residence and equity. 

"Many people who have been working on sustainability topics have their income and self-respect enmeshed in the story that they are helping to change organsiations and societies for the better. The possibility that such efforts have failed is a challenge to their identity. [...] Desire to avoid difficult emotions explains why people don't want to accept that we are in an era of collapse. [...] as middle-class professionals we are statistically far more likely to be apologists for the established societal order than working classes or less educated persons" (pp.264-265).

This quote is also about Bendell himself and about his previous career - about a time when he believed that benevolent companies would save the world by adopting and working towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or some other such top-down framework. But the quote is also worrying because it implies that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". A lot of knowledge (and a pinch or two of wisdom) is good, but perhaps it's better to know nothing than to know some, but believe you know enough or a lot? This puts a lot of responsibility on me as a university teacher. Am I preaching false hope if I imply that we can fix problems facing humanity? And are my colleagues preaching false hope because they can't handle (their own) difficult emotions of fears for their own and their children's future?

I bought Thomas Homer-Dixon's "Commanding hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril" (2020) because I liked his previous book "The upside of down" (2006) very much. But then I for some reason put it aside and didn't read it for several years. 

Homer-Dixon is a very good writer (not all researchers are), and it was a pleasure to read his book as he weaves different stories together, including the story of Stephanie May, who campaigned against nuclear testing at the end of the 1950's and in the 1960's. She worked tirelessly against all odds because she was convinced she was doing the right thing for her country, her children and all children in the world. So the story of Stephanie May, and a central message of Homer-Dixon's book, is how to find / carve out / create a space that is both "feasible" and "enough" and to work towards what you believe is right even when success seems implausible. And we know we can change the world because it has been done before (lex Stephanie May):

"Instead of giving up on hope, or losing it, we need to find it again, reimagine it, and reinvigorate it as a potential source of strength [but] It should be honest, not delusional; passionate, not weak; astute, not naive, and brave, not timid. Most importantly, if we're going to avoid thet downward spiral of resignation and loss of agency, it must be powerful, not passive. It must give us a real sense of purpose for positive action" (p.60).

I in particular thought that Homer-Dixon's thinking about the connection between uncertainty and hope were surprising, counterintuitive and therefore refreshing:

"While uncertainty can quite reasonably provoke fear - fear of the unknown - it can also give us grounds for hope, because it creates a mental space in which we can imagine positive possibilities" (p.75).

If nothing is pre-determined and if there is uncertainty, then there is also hope - even when things look bleak! 

David Fleming's book "Surviving the future: Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy" (2016) is a curious choice of book, because I have no idea of why I bought it. I must have read about it and become impressed by it, but I have no recollection of where I read about it nor what impressed me. When I read the foreword, I learned that Fleming died in 2010 and that the book was edited and published posthumously. 

Despite the fact that I don't know why I bought it, it was an interesting read. It sings the praise of localism and it's thus not a coincidence that Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Network, has written the foreword. From the back of the book:

"Surviving the future [...] lays out a powerfully different vision for a new economics in a post-growth world. The subtitle - Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy - hints at Fleming's vision. He believed that the market economy will not survive its inherent flaws beyond the early decades of this century and that its failure will bring great challenges, but he did not dwell on this: "We know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow." 

Fleming also assumes that the end (collapse) is not very far away, although he refers to it as "descent", but he doesn't dwell on it because he is already thinking about what comes after. Since Fleming has such an alternative view of the world and of what will become of it, he arrives at and elaborates on many interesting but (again) counterintuitive conclusions of his, which could be disturbing to anyone who is steeped in the current social and economic system and who has problems imagining alternatives:

"The question to consider, therefore, is not whether the crash will happen, but how to develop the skills, the will and the resources necessary to recapture the initiative and build the resilient sequel to our present society. It will be the decentralised, low-impact human ecology which has always taken the human story forward from the closing down of civilisations: small-scale community, closed-loop systems, and a strong culture" (p.8). 

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On finding the balance between imparting despair and hope

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The results of "freak" flash floods in Valencia at the end of October last year.

All in all I'm very happy about my course DM2573 "Sustainability and Media Technology". It could equally well have been called "Sustainability and Computing", but since it's a compulsory course in the Media Technology engineering programme, it's has the name it has. It's also my main teaching commitment every year, and the number of students taking the course has risen over time; last year (Nov-Dec) 135 students took the course - up from 110 the year before. Also, the course has been taught every year since 2012. And while the course evolves and changes every year, it hasn't changed fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the world and in the student population.

We have a concluding panel debate in the course every year where five invited guests discuss "Images of the future" (e.g. anything and everything sustainability). Some years ago a student asked a difficult question; "knowing what you know, how do you get up in the morning?" and one of the panelist answered:

”I have little hope we can fix the problems, but I still wake up every day and act as if we can change the world. And who knows, perhaps we really can change the world if enough people act this way?” 

I immedately noted down this quote and have it on a slide that I show the students every year. And I love the answer because it starts by establishing a low point ("there is no hope") but opens up to the possibility that there might, in fact, be hope ("perhaps we can change the world [if we work hard together]"). 

So when we started to give the course in 2012, we felt we needed to shake the students up. We were afraid there would be one or more climate deniers (or climate sceptics) in the classroom who would derail the course, and we didn't want to get embroiled in endless discussions about whether climate change was real, whether it was anthropogenic (man-made) or whether it was serious. So our strategy was to hit the students over the head with a flood of unassailable facts that would convince even the most hard-headed student that this was indeed real, that this was indeed serious and that sustainability (including climate change) is the major challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. And we succeeded, but perhaps too well. Perhaps you do need to hit rock bottom to really understand (and feel) that this is real, that this is serious and that this is scary - but you also need to see what your own role could be in making positive changes happen in the world. So lately I have come to believe that we have been successful in getting students to understand the seriousness of the situation, but that we have failed them but making despair convincing - without making hope practical. 

The world has changed and so have the students. While we have toned down the gloominess, the course still hasn't changed enough to meet current students where they are. We don’t really need to convince students anymore that climate change and climate-related environmental disasters are real and that they are serious. Every year there's one or two new disaster right before or during the course. This year it was the catastrophic flash floods in Valencia just as the course started (see image above) and the catastrophic fires in LA. just as the course winded down (see image below).

So if we don't need to convince students that "shit just got real", what then is our task? The scholar and public intellectual Raymond Williams has said that "It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns" (in his book "Resources of Hope" (1989)). My own take-away version of this is that “It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must… extend our [teaching in this course]”.

Humanity is in bad spot, we are surely in overshoot and there is a risk that as we wake up to "the century of declines", there will be much suffering in decades to come. But this still doesn't answer the crucial question that I face as a researcher and as an educator and teacher, e.g. “taking all of that into account, what do we do now?”.

So to me as a researcher and teacher who want to do my bit in the transition to a sustainable society, I think my teaching is a better bet in terms of "impact" than my research. I educate engineering students who will start their careers a few years down the road, and I can't think of a task that is more important than to make them care about sustainability - and for at least some of them to care enough to also want to work towards the transition to a sustainable society. And this course (with 135 students) is my single best bet for changing the world, So how do we maximise the chance that taking this course has Positive Effects in the world? More concretely, how should the course be remade to increase the chance that as many students as possible, after they have finished the course, will feel (realistic) hope and a will to act on this hope (rather than, say, despair and passivity)? And what then needs to change in the course to help facilitate such a shift?

This is the starting point of a remake of the course before the next course round starts in a little less than nine months from now. This coming week I will meet up with colleagues who led seminar groups in the course for a two-hour brainstorming session, and I've also invited other people who are familiar with the course - including students who just finished taking it. 

One of the starting points will be the seven questions we spent time discussing at the very last seminar in the course. Students in eight different seminar groups each wrote multiple post-it notes to answer the following questions: 

1) What have you learned in this course about sustainability?

2) What have you learned in this course about yourself?

3) What is the single most important lesson you take away from this course?

4) As the course winds down, what do you feel most optimistic about?

5) As the course winds down, what do you feel most pessimistic about

6) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two months ago?

7) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two or five years ago?

So we have collected several 100s of post-it notes that will serve as a starting point for our discussions, and while my colleagues (and students) will help kick this off (there will be ≈ 10 of us), the responsibility to follow through and work with the results, and later to implement changes in the course, falls on me (with input and help from my colleague Elina Eriksson). And I'm ready to take responsibility for this task and hope the changes will make a difference for hundreds of our students in years to come.

#[informative-hashtag], #[motivational-hashtag], #[humblebrag-hashtag]

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Leadership course from hell

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I read a (Swedish-language) essay/article almost two years ago (March 2023) about a "leadership course from hell". It referred to an experiment that was conducted 15 years ago when managers who applied to a leadership course were randomly divided into two different groups. One group attended a traditional leadership course, while the other group were exposed to strong aesthetic experiences that made demands on them and that were hard to understand and take in; texts that were shocking and that clashed with each other, musical performances that complemented or enhanced the texts that that stirred up strong feelings in the audience. The performances were followed by space for discussions between the participants, but with very little guidance and leadership. Some people were disgusted, others were angry and many were confused. The performances forced these managers (who were anonymous to each other) to confront difficult feelings in themselves, like what does it mean to be a leader and what does it mean to be a human being? What would I have done had I been in that situation (as, say, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp - or one of the guards in that camp)? What guides me in my everyday life, and what is my purpose in life? 

As it turned out, the people who took the traditional leadership course had their pre-existing beliefs reinforced; felt selected and special and distanced themselves from the employees they were meant to lead. They in fact became worse leaders by disengaging and caring less for their employees compared to before they took the course, while those who took the alternate course and experienced the "Shibboleth" performances instead became better leaders. How do we know they became better or worse leaders? We know that because the medial researcher who led the experiment, Julia Romanowska, made before-and-after measurements of a hormone, DHEA-S, that protects people from stress. Her research established that stress levels of both leaders and their employees dropped when the leaders had taken the Shibboleth "leadership course from hell", while they instad rose among employees whose leaders had taken the traditional leadership course. 

All of this happened not because, but despite the participants own experiences of taking these two courses. Those who had taken the traditional leadership course believed they had become more self-confident, as well as humbler and better listeners, while the Shibboleth group became more self-critical, more aware of their responsibility and more unsure about their ability to live up to what their conscience demanded of them.

All of this was extremely intriguing and I therefore bought the book, "Schibbolet-effekten: Ledarskap, konsten och människans ansvar" (2021) ["The Shibboleth effect: Leadership, art and human responsibility"] and read it half a year ago. I had met Julia Romanowska a year earlier and I got in touch with her to invite her to give a guest talk at KTH during the autumn, but it didn't work out for various reasons, and not the least because she has become very busy as of lately (after her book was published). She did mention that she would give a Shibboleth course during the first half of 2024 and that it had become fully booked only two hours after she had announced it on LinkedIn. Fortunately there was a selection process based on a personal application letter, and I felt that I had a good opportunity to write a good letter after I had read her book (and worked with related leadership concepts through Art of Hosting). The course started this past week and I attend it together with a colleague of mine from KTH, Anders Rosén (who also incidentally is responsible for teaching the pedagogical course I started this past week - the topic of my previous blog post!). I have thus been to the first of six meet-ups during the spring and look forward to attend the remainder at the pace of about one per month. 

One difference between taking the course now (compared to the experiments she writes about in the book) is that people back then had no idea what they had signed up for. People were very confused and wondered when the course would start, who had put together this disconcerting performance and what the heck this performance was about? It is different now, I don't think it's possible to attend the course I'm taking without knowing pretty well what you have signed up for in advance. 

All in all, the first day was characterised by three main activities; a Shibboleth performance, repeated solo reflections/journaling, and whole-group discussions (sitting in a large circle). The performance we experienced led to wide-ranging discussions about good and evil, efficiency and dehumanisation, responsibility and moral preparedness, complexity and control, means and ends, perpetrators and victims, forgiveness and reconciliation, life and death, love and hate, friends and enemies, cooperation and competition, collaborators and objectors, secularisation and faith, facts and feelings, body and soul, right and wrong. I look forward to the next time we meet in the course!

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Challenge Driven Education

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Me and my colleague Elina Eriksson started a new course this week, "Teaching and Learning for Challenge Driven Education in a Global Context" (LH233V) - a pedagogical course for teachers that is given by a friend our ours, Anders Rosén. While the course is given by our university and a large majority of the participants are teachers at KTH, some come form other universities in the Stockholm area (e.g. Stockholm University and Karolinska Institute), but also from different universities in Africa, e.g. Strathmore University (Kenya), University of Eswatini (Eswatini - formerly known as Swaziland) and Botho University (Botswana).

"Challenge-driven" implies that students will work with real-world challenges rather than "toy problems" that are chosen just for them to learn something (but possibly with few real-world implications). The course stresses collaborative learning an co-creation and thus fits well with what we do in our new master's programme in Sustainable Digitalisation. 

We have in fact planned to give a larger (15 ECTS) challenge-driven project course in our programme during the third term and taking this pedagogical course is our way of learning more about challenge-driven education while simultaneously developing our course. Our course is called "Transformative Change in Complex Systems" (DM2803) and it will be given at 50% pace throughout this coming autumn term (August - December) and this is the short version of what students will do in our course:

"In this challenge driven project course, students will get the possibility to analyse and handle “wicked”, complex sustainability problems in collaboration with the surrounding society. The students learn to identify and analyse needs, challenges and goal conflicts and to design interventions that intend to achieve change. The projects will be based on sustainability-related problems that stakeholders in the surrounding society have formulated. In the course students also get to evaluate interventions, to ensure they favour the society in general, organisations, individuals, other species and whole ecosystems locally as well as globally, in the short and long term. The students will also be given tools to lead trans-disciplinary co-creative processes, where also transformative learning can be identified and developed."

So our project course exists "on paper", but we need to develop it and fill the DM2803 "container" with content - and that's the project we will work on during the spring as we take the KTH course for teachers. It's all very nifty.

But back to the pedagogical course we are taking, LH233V. That a course is "challenge-driven" means that it is far away from the traditional "conduit metaphor" where the job of the teacher is to "package" and "transmit" knowledge to the student. Challenge-driven courses instead start with a case - a complex real-world problem that is open-ended (has no one right solution), and project outcomes and learning outcomes are equally important, where "project outcomes" can lead to change in society and "learning outcomes" can lead to change in people. 

The course also emphasises complex, "wicked problems" and sustainability, both which fit us well very and where traditional engineering education instead usually only address complicated problems (and might in fact reduce complex problems into complicated problems to make them addressable (thereby missing out on the complexity and messiness of the real world at the risk of making the solution partial and irrelevant). 

Building on a paper by Sterling (2011), "Transformative Learning and Sustainability", there was an interesting image that stated that traditional (engineering) education usually addresses only 1st order change/learning, e.g. doing things better in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and optimisation. Addressing 2nd order change/learning also examines and changes norms and assumptions and 3rd order change/learning also has the potential to challenge and change values, beliefs and worldviews. Challenge-driven education thus has the potential to address the need for transformative systemic change in society. Discussing challenges of car society, 1st order solutions might emphasise driverless or electric cars to make travel more efficient and less polluting. 2nd order change might instead emphasise car manufacturers taking responsibility for the whole lifecycle of a car, alternatives to car-centric city planning and improved public transport while 3rd order (paradigm) change might questions assumptions and come up with suggestions such as prioritising self-powered vehicles (e.g. bicycles) or creating walkable cities that reduces the need for transports. 

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Notebook LM

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These podcasters aren’t real: Our AI experiment with Google’s Notebook LM

I think my colleague Björn Hedin told me about a new AI tool from Google, Notebook LM, sometime in (possibly the second half of) October. Someone had notified him about the tool and Björn had then created an audio file that summarised a phd thesis into a 30-minute long "podcast". We both tried Notebook LM some and thought it was extremely interesting; you can upload a pdf file of a scientific article to Notebook LM and it will generate a "podcast" (sound file/audio overview) where two podcasters who know each other well together walk you through the main results of the article and also, well, banter in such a way that the walk-through can become quite entertaining (but for some instead "too chatty"). And it only takes a few minutes for Notebook LM to generate such an podcast out of thin air. There are of course no real podcasters, rather "just" an AI that "has listened to" (been trained on data from) a zillion hours of TV, radio and podcast hosts who talk to each other. This very powerful tool can however basically create a "podcast" out of any file so that you can listen to an audio summary that highlights the main points of an article, a bunch of articles, a powerpoint presentation or a whole phd thesis:

"The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them."

Not long thereafter (on November 1), a student sent me a mail and asked me to make my lecture slides available before the lecture or at least directly after the lecture so that he could use Notebook LM to create a podcast that he could listen to on his way to the lecture or at least on his way back home. It just so happened that Björn would give a guest lecture in my course just 10 days later and part of the literature for that lecture was a systematic literature review that Björn, me and our colleagues Cecilia Katzeff and Elina Eriksson have written:

Hedin, B., Katzeff, C., Eriksson, E., Pargman, D. (2019). "A Systematic Review of Digital Behaviour Change Interventions for More Sustainable Food Consumption". Sustainability 2019, Vol. 11, Page 2638, 11(9), 2638 (available online)

As is the case for all systematic literature reviews, this review is quite boring but very useful, so we decided to do an experiment. We created a 13 minutes long Notebook LM podcast of the paper (available here) and made it available together with the article itself. We unfortunately didn't think about following it up by for example asking the 135 students who took the course if they had listened to the podcast and/or read the article and what they thought about them. 

What did happen though was that I immediately followed up the lecture with a message to all the students in the course where I encouraged them to get in touch with me if they were interested in writing a Notebook LM-related thesis during the spring term. There was a lot of interest and now, 10 weeks later, it is clear that I will lead a supervision group where eight students will work in pairs (at a 50% pace) throughout the spring term and write their bachelor's theses about Notebook LM. I'm really excited about this and think the results could be very interesting. I will also continue to do my own experiments with Notebook LM (as will Björn) independently of what "my" thesis students will do during the spring. 

One of the issues we are interested in is the accuracy of the podcasts that Notebook LM generates and we will therefore reach out to researchers in different disciplines with an offer, so if you happen to be a researcher and you are interested in being served with podcasts of scientific articles (we are primarily thinking about podcasts that are based on your own texts!), then by all means feel free to reach out to me by mail.

It might sound as if I'm super positive about Notebook LM, but that is however not  the case. I'm quite worried about vario us possible or plausible negative effects of using the tool. While it's extremely powerful, it's not clear what the effects of using it will be, and that might then be part of what we want to explore during the spring. My uneasiness with the tool is not shared by my colleague Björn who has more charitable view of human beings (including of students) than I have. I worry about whether students will stop reading articles – since it's much easier to listen to a 10-15 minutes long podcast than to struggle with a text that it might one or two hours to read. When then might be the consequences of that be? Well, see for example my text about Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains" that I wrote about (on this blog) 14 years ago:

"When deep reading gives way to shallow reading - involving skimming texts, following links and skitting from text to text and channel to channel - Carr also worries about deep thinking giving way to shallow thinking. [...] In Carr's words we become "pancake people" who know little about much."

Perhaps I worry too much, but then again perhaps I don't worry enough...? The only thing I'm sure of at the moment is that I will have a better grounding for being worried/not being worried four or five months from now... and I will certainly get back to this subject later this spring when these investigations are finished!

Here a few links to resources about Notebook LM (from Wikipedia):

• Latent Space (65 minutes long podcast), "How NotebookLM Was Made" (October 25, 2024)
• Levy, Steven, "Google’s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant" (Wired, Dec 8, 2023)
• Wang, Biao (product manager at Google Labs), "NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources" (Sept 11, 2024)
• Boran, Marie, "Five Productivity Hacks Using Google's New AI Podcast Creator" (Newsweek, Sept 23, 2024)
• Orland, Kyle, "Fake AI “podcasters” are reviewing my book and it’s freaking me out" (Ars Technica, Sept 23, 2024)

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My 10-day dual continental fact-finding mission

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I've been on a 10-day grand tour around Europe, travelling through Sweden and Denmark and then visiting Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands. Staring last Friday (Jan 10) and getting beck to Sweden today, Sunday (Jan 19).

When I travel in my job, it's usually to go somewhere to attend something for a few days or a week (e.g. a conference). This time has been different though and I have come to think of my trip as a "dual fact-finding mission with side quests". 

Fact-finding mission #1 - Art of Hosting in higher education

At KTH and in our new master's programme we are working with "Art of Hosting" (AoH) as often as we can (the full name is "Art of Hosting and harvesting conversations that matter"). I have written about it on the blog two times before back in 2022 (here and here). Me and my colleague Elina were interviewed about our AoH practices and experiences in December and one reason for my trip was to meet and talk other Art of Hosting practitioners with a special focus on people who practice AoH in higher education. To that end, I have had wonderful and very fruitful meetings in Hamburg (Frauke Godat and Sophie Dishman), Paris (Nancy Bragard, Mira Bangel, Florence Daumarie and Oana Juncu), Brussels (Ian Andersen) and The Hague (Mansi Jasuja). I also brought with me an AoH-related e-book called "Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota" (2013). I'm thankful for all the people who have taken the time to meet and talk to me as these talks have been very useful for me to understand 1) what we do differently at KTH, 2) how we can develop our teaching and 3) some concrete insights we can add to the paper we are writing this spring about our experience of teaching Art of Hosting at KTH (more about that later). 

Fact-finding mission #2 - the 21st century court jester

I started to do stand-up almost three years ago. I in fact signed up for a course five years ago - but it was cancelled due to Covid! I then took a course in stand-up comedy two years later (and wrote about it here). I have for quite some time thought about what's next after stand-up. Since it is my sincere belief that every organisation needs a devil's advocate who dares to say say what everybody knows but nobody dares to utter (like "the emperor has no clothes"), I've concluded that beyond stand-up is the court jester. The court jester is the only one who is allowed to criticise the king (but gently and with humor and wit), but the jester is also works for the king for the betterment of the kingdom. So what does the 21st century court jester look like and how does he (or she) behave, dress and perform? These are questions I've been reading up on, thinking about, talked to people about and taking notes on for a year or two in preparation for this future performance. And so my second fact-finding mission was to travel to Paris and The Hague to learn more about the jester - past and present. In Paris I want to an exhibition at The Louvre called "Figures of the Fool" (it closes in two weeks). I also had the opportunity to talk and ask questions to one of the two curators of the exhibition, Pierre-Yves Le Pogam (conservateur général, Département des Sculptures). It was extremely valuable to first see the exhibition and then have the opportunity to talk to Pierre-Yves! In The Hague I later meet up with Juri Hoedemakers who gets jobs as a jester in the business world ("My mission is to bring back the role of the Hofnar in today's business world. Because who holds up a mirror to the kings of today?"). Juri has written no less than three books about the court jester (in Dutch, one is being translated to English) and he also writes his phd thesis about the court jester. I'd say his interpretation of what the 21st century court jester is and does is closer to a management consultant (with a few twists), while I'm equally or more interested in the performance in itself. We've talked before and will talk again but this was the first time we met in person and we had so much to talk about! I also brought some texts with me on my trip about medieval and modern court jesters, organisational paradoxes and humor as an agent of change.

The exhibition Figures du Fou at The Louvre

Side quests

I also took the opportunity to do a number of "side quests" besides the two fact-finding missions:

- I gave a talk at the Sorbonne (HCI Sorbonne) by invitation of last-year phd student Solène Lambert. I sponsored her postdoc fellowship application at KTH's cross-disciplinary research centre Digital Futures, but the competition was fierce and we found out earlier in January that she unfortunately had not been selected. The fact that she did her phd in only three years makes it hard to compete against others who have four years or who also teach and then can stretch out their phd over a period of five calendars years. I was anyway very surprised by the huge turnout of people who came to listen to my talk about wicked problems, about our new master's programme in Sustainable Digitalisation and our introductory flagship course "Leading complex change processes". The title of my talk was "The chief source of problems are solutions: how to teach engineering students about complexity and sustainability". I was also taken to a two-hour lunch after my talk and had delightful conversations with half a dozen people from Solène's lab, and, with a former master's student from KTH, Tove Grimstad Bang, who was also currently finishing up her phd thesis in Paris. Below is the invitation from LinkedIn in French just for the fun of it!

- I listened to a concert with one of my favourite French (actually Quebecois) artists Alexis HK in Rouen. I was both lucky and unlucky because it turned out that not just one but two of my favourite French artistis were performing on the same day and in the same city - and at the same time. I chose to listen to Alexis HK since I hadn't heard him live before and it was good, but I still think I chose the wrong concert because it was equally much a show (in French) that I couldn't follow and with music that was specially written for the show. So in the end I didn't get to hear any of my favourite songs of his (but I did get to see Alexis HK up close and I could listen to his wonderful voice, but still, I had prepared by listening to all his seven studio albums non-stop for a month and I had nothing for it...

Alexis HK and Benoît Dorémus

- I also meet up with my very good friend Roy Bendor (TU Delft) in The Hague and he had graciously invited me to sleep at his place for two nights. I also met his son and his daughter (his wife was away) and had many great conversations with Roy. As it so happens, Roy will visit us in Stockholm for two weeks later this spring as a Digital Futures' Scholar-in-Residence and I will surely write about that in May. 

- I managed to meet up with my phd student Joe Llewellyn who is in Amsterdam. I already wrote about that in my previous blog post so I won't say anything more about it here.

- I meet up with a friend, Hanneke, who gave me a tour of Amsterdam and of the Van Gogh museum. She works as a tour guide and I can't image a greater luxury than enjoying her company and having her give me a personal tour of the city and the museum. Any question I had about Van Gogh's life, she could answer. I also had dinner with her and her man, Julien, who invited me to his apartment. 

- I surreptitiously happened to share my sleeper car on the train from Hamburg to Stockholm with a very interesting man from Belgium, Dirk Holemans, who has been a researcher and a politician representing the Green Party in Belgium. He now leads a green think thank and had been invited to Stockholm to talk about his just-published book "Enough: Thriving societies beyond growth" (co-authored with Lara Ferrente and Elze Vermaas, pdf version available here) at the Swedish green think tank Cogito. We really had a lot to talk about and he invited me to join him at the event where he was going to talk on Monday night. I would have come had it not been for a previous engagement! The really fun thing is that when we had breakfast, I could hear three Swedish guys talk about the same event (reading the invitation, who would be in the panel) and I told them that the speaker was sitting just beside them. This led to a three-hour conversation with three guys who were active in the Green party's youth (or possibly student) section. I thus has super stimulating company on the train and it didn't matter the least that the night train form Hamburg was delayed for three hours due to "upkeep of the tracks" (we arrived at mid-day instead on 9 in the morning). 

All in all a terrific trip. This was in fact one of my very best work trips ever.

Invitation to my talk at Sorbonne

Breakfast at Hotel Les Theatres, Paris

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Ph.d. student Joe Llewellyn got his first AND second journal articles published within a month!

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I am the co-supervisor of ph.d. student Joe Llewellyn and he just got his second article published, "Assessing the impact of energy coaching with smart technology interventions to alleviate energy poverty". It's published in the journal Scientific Reports (published by Nature Publishing Group (now called Nature Portfolio)). Joe's main supervisor is my colleague Cecilia Katzeff and he in fact also has a third supervisor, Fredrik Johansson.

Scientific Reports (established in 2011) is a "peer-reviewed, open-access scientific mega journal covering all areas of the natural sciences" and "In September 2016, the journal became the largest in the world by number of articles" (both quotes from Wikipedia). According to themselves, "Scientific Reports is the 5th most-cited journal in the world". So I think it's kind of a big thing. It's also a big study and the image above illustrates where in Amsterdam the 117 (!) homes that Joe visited are located. And besides these 117 homes, Joe revisited 73 of them again for a total of 190 home visits. 

Joe did this study together with Senseable City Lab (three of the authors are from there) in Amsterdam. Since there is a strong link between the lab and MIT (fourth author Carlo Ratti, who is a faculty member at MIT, founded and directs the Senseable City Lab), the best way to understand what Joe's article is about is to read the popular science write-up by MIT News. It starts like this:

"Many people around the globe are living in energy poverty, meaning they spend at least 8 percent of their annual household income on energy. Addressing this problem is not simple, but an experiment by MIT researchers shows that giving people better data about their energy use, plus some coaching on the subject, can lead them to substantially reduce their consumption and costs.

The experiment, based in Amsterdam, resulted in households cutting their energy expenses in half, on aggregate — a savings big enough to move three-quarters of them out of energy poverty.

“Our energy coaching project as a whole showed a 75 percent success rate at alleviating energy poverty,” says Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher with MIT’s Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the experiment’s results."

Besides MIT Senseable City Lab and KTH, other organisations involved in the study were the City of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Insitute) and Stichting !WOON (an independent, non-profit foundation).

However, besides this article, Joe also got his first article, "Citizen perceptions and interactions towards self-sufficiency, community plot ratio and civic generosity within sustainable neighbourhoods", published only a month ago in the journal "City and Environment Interactions". Cecilia Katzeff, me and Fredrik Johansson are again co-authors. 

This was the study Joe did (almost) two years ago in Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm (see map below), before Joe went to Amsterdam to the study of how to alleviate energy poverty. The paper would ideally have been published before Joe went to Amsterdam, but it was delayed for various reasons. So it has taken a long time for Joe to get his research published, but now he's on fire!

Congratulations Joe for getting both of these articles published!

Side note: as it so happens, I'm in The Netherlands at the moment and will go to Amsterdam tomorrow and meet up with Joe. Why am I in The Netherlands? That's the topic of my next blog post...

Abstract (paper 1)

Energy poverty affects 550,000 homes in the Netherlands yet policy interventions to alleviate this issue are rare. Therefore, we test two energy coaching interventions in Amsterdam: a static information group (n = 67) which received energy efficient products and one energy-use report, and a smart information group (n = 50), which also had a display providing real-time feedback on energy-use. Results across both groups, show a 75% success rate for alleviating energy poverty. On average homes reduced monthly electricity consumption by 62 kWh (33%), gas by 41 m3 (42%), bills by €104 (53%) and percentage of income spent on energy from 10.1% to 5.3%.

Abstract (paper 2)

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released design indexes for sustainable neighbourhoods, including self-sufficiency, community plot ratio and civic generosity. However, they are developed from an urban planning perspective and not researched in relation to: a) the citizen perspective and b) how citizen interactions can contribute to the environment. Therefore, this research tests a novel set of indexes with an underused method of ethnographic video interviews with 14 citizens of a known sustainable neighbourhood in Stockholm, Sweden. A thematic analysis conducted on 28 h of interview data collected over a 4-week period yielded 5 main themes, from outdoor public spaces. Self-sufficiency findings suggest that citizens 1) perceive small scale self-sufficiency to be challenged by large scale structural efficiency and 2) circular actions with food waste to biogas can develop the self-sufficiency index further. Community plot ratio findings suggest that citizens 3) perceive community spaces to be accessible for all but not used by all. Civic generosity findings suggest citizens 4) perceive an imbalance between self-interests of the individual versus collective interests of the community, while 5) experienced citizens feel personally responsible to pioneer civic generosity interactions. UNEP indexes for designing neighbourhoods can define local sustainability, however, our findings support this, only if they can be acted upon by the citizens who live there.

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Ian Brooks' phd thesis (viva)

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I'm happy to have been one of two external examiners for Ian Brooks' phd thesis this past week (Tuesday Jan 7), "The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as Requirements in Systems Engineering: Listening to All the Stakeholders". Ian has been a long-time management consultant but is now "Senior Lecturer in Sustainable IT" at the University at the West of England (UWE) in Bristol and his thesis passed the viva (oral examination) with "minor amendments". 

Being an external examiner for a phd thesis in the UK differs significantly from how things are done in Sweden. Here are some of the main differences:

• The examination was not open to the public. There were in fact only five persons present; ph.d. student Ian Brooks himself, two external examiners (me and University of Zürich Professor Emeritus of Informatics and Sustainability Lorenz Hilty, Director of Studies and Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science James Longhurst and independent chair Associate Professor in Economics Timothy Hinks.   
• Ian's supervisor Associate Professor Mohammed Odeh was not present at the viva and this would be totally impossible (would never happen) in Sweden. I assume he was not invited/supposed to be present at the viva.
• A Swedish compilation thesis consists of a number of scientific articles and an introductory chapter. This was also the case with Ian's thesis, but the proportions were all topsy-turvy (from my point of view). In Sweden it's the 4-5 scientific articles that are The Thing, but in the UK it's the introductory chapter that is The Think, but it's hard to call it "the introductory chapter" since it's The Thing. Ian's introductory chapter (thesis) was 150 pages long and his articles were unceremoniously published in "Appendix 3 – Papers published from this research project".
• The viva version is not the final thesis. Ian passed with minor amendments and now has some time to work on his text before he hands in the final version. This differs from Sweden where it's the final version of the ph.d. thesis that is presented. As apart from how we do things in Sweden, I think it's better to have the opportunity to work with the text after the examination.
• I complain a lot about admin and about bureaucracy at KTH, but UWE might in fact win a bureaucracy battle between KTH and UWE.

I have met Ian several times at the International ICT For Sustainability (ICT4S) conferences and the last time was in Stockholm this past summer. Ian has worked with his thesis part time (besides teaching at UWE) and has at times had such a heavy teaching load that the thesis has had to be put on hold. He started his research back in 2015 and has finally - after 10 years - managed to finish and present it. I congratulate him for this feat and for his endurance - since it's not easy to work on a project for 10 years and manage to maintain interest and drive and to manage to finish it!

Here are a few examples of things I learned from reading Ian's thesis:

• Volkswagen's "Dieselgate" was an important motivator for Ian's choice of topic:
• "2015 [...] was the year which saw Volkswagen admit to using software to cheat emissions tests for some of its diesel engine models. [...] What became known as ‘Dieselgate’ [was] An object lesson in how software-intensive software engineering has significant negative impacts on sustainability" and at the hart of his study is the question of weather the "newly adopted [2015] SDGs [could] be used as requirements in SE [Systems Engineering]?"
• There are 9 required characteristics of well-formed requirements as stated by ISO 29148:2018. Well-formed requirements should be 1) Necessary, 2) Appropriate, 3) Unambiguous, 4) Complete, 5) Singular, 6) Feasible, 7) Verifiable, 8) Correct and 9) Conforming. I love these and some of these characteristics (or the very idea of having characteristics) could serve as inspiration for quality criteria of academic texts - although academic texts are of course not "actionable" the way input/requirements to a technical system are.
• Besides the 17 SDG goals, there are also 169 SDG targets but only five of these targets can be considered compliant with the characteristics of well-formed requirements (above).
• The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) play a very important role in the thesis and while i have many objections to the SDGs, Ian included a (not-so-funny) funny-mirror conspiracy-theory version of each SDG. It sounded so bizarre I actually looked it up (so you don't have to) and exemplify below:
• SDG 1 - No Poverty = Welfare Dependence
• "End poverty in all its forms everywhere" actually means Centralized banks, IMF, World Bank, Fed to control all finances, digital one world currency in a cashless society
• SDG 2 - Zero Hunger = GMO / Codex Alimentarius
• SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being = Forced Vaccinations
• SDG 4 - Quality Education = Mass Indoctrination
• SDG 5 - Gender Equality = Destroy Family
• SDG 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation = Water Rationing
• "Ensure accesss to water and sanitation for all" actually means Privatize all water sources, poison with fluoride and other toxic elements
• SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy = Smart Grid Surveillance
• SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth = No Property Rights
• SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure = Slave Labour
• "Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation" actually means Toll roads, push public transit, remove free travel, environmental restrictions
• SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities = Communism
• SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities = Prison-like Cities
• "Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" actually means Big brother big data surveillance state (Comment: this might in fact not be too far from the truth though...)
• SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption = One Currency
• SDG 13 - Climate Action = Energy Rationing
• SDG 14 - Life Below Water = Control Wildlife
• SDG 15 - Life On Land = Control Resources
• SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions = Perpetual War
• SDG 17- Partnership for the Goals = One World Government
• "Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development" actually means Remove national sovereignty worldwide, promote globalism under the “authority” and bloated, Orwellian bureaucracy of the UN

Abstract

This study explored the use of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as requirements in Systems Engineering (SE). It used Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) in the development of artefacts for transforming the SDGs into systems requirements. Five case studies, including rigorous, plan-based projects, generated design knowledge for using the SDGs including the importance of working at target level and the difficulty of transforming the SDGs into business-relevant, well- formed requirements. The cases included Additive Layer Manufacturing (3D printing) and Cancer Care Informatics, both having safety-critical impact. Findings showed the elicitation of requirements covering ten SDGs compared to four SDGs covered by a Business-As-Usual method and the critical role of systems impact assessment using a broad scope. This is the first study to have used all seventeen SDGs as an integrated set for requirements elicitation and shown their potential to increase sustainability-driven requirements for software-intensive systems. The SDGs enable systems engineers to ‘listen to’ a global set of stakeholders, articulating the “World We Want” by 2030. The thesis contributes “how to” knowledge for SDG SE methods and recommendations for theory and practice. It emphasises the urgency for the United Nations to clarify the post- 2030 agenda if the SDGs are to continue to be of value in SE.