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 4-6 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 with 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 include 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.

Academic family reunion

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My "academic family tree" with my supervisor, my "siblings" and our (current) ph.d. students.

We organised an academic family reunion. It all started with a flippant mid-November conversation at an after work pub near KTH. Me, Annika and Rémy talked about my friend and ph.d. colleague Christer Garbis who moved to the United States 20 years ago and who would visit Sweden over Christmas and New Year. Chatting about this, we realised that Christer was their long-lost never-seen "academic uncle" - since both Christer and their supervisor Henrik Artman had the same supervisor - Yvonne Wærn - when they were ph.d. students. Annika even "knew" Christer through reading academic articles that Christer had co-authored together with her supervisor Henrik and their advisor Yvonne back in the days. Since Yvonne was also my supervisor, I too was their "academic uncle". After having stated this, the idea started to grow that perhaps we should organise a get-together (academic family reunion) with Christer, Yvonne and all her academic "children" and "grandchildren" at KTH. 

Yvonne Wærn was a professor of (cognitive) psychology at Stockholm University before she moved to Linköping and the interdisciplinary department of communication studies where Henrik, me and Christer (in that order) did our doctoral studies. But besides the three younger "sons", Yvonne already had two academic "daughters" from Stockholm University who also works at KTH; Cecilia Katzeff and Ann Lantz. Yvonne retired more than 20 years ago and none of us had met her for ages. So we started to plan a get-together in my home. To this we added "the younger generation"; Cecilia's, Henrik's and my 8 current ph.d. students Sofie, Arjun, Joe, Jukka, Annika, Rémy, Aksel and Minna (see the family tree above). 

We planned the day (Monday Jan 6) and the time around what would work for Yvonne who is 89 years old and lives in Linköping (and who would have to take the train to go to Stockholm). Unfortunately not everyone could attend the family reunion - Ann had a prior commitment that day, Joe was in Amsterdam and Minna doesn't live in Stockholm could not attend. Perhaps worse was that Yvonne, who had already bought a train ticket, had the bad luck of falling and breaking her arm, making it impossible for her to go to Stockholm. She instead had to make a "guest appearance" through FaceTime. Besides Yvonne and the four ph.d. students of hers and our six current ph.d. students, mine and Christer's wives also attended (my wife in fact worked together with Yvonne 20+ years ago when she had just arrived to Sweden). 

And it turned out to be a lovely event! To make things simple, it was neither a lunch nor a dinner event, but rather just a daytime potluck cocktail party (with finger food). Everyone prepared something and me and Tessy offered up our home as well as drinks and my special spicy guacamole. It really wasn't a lot of work, but the outcome was spectacular and it was so nice to "meet up" with Yvonne. While Yvonne more or less quit academia cold turkey the day she retired, she had the exact same enthusiasm and curiosity we all remember from when we were her ph.d. students. She also asked (interrogated) us about many different things including our current research and our views of the current AI boom/hype. She worked on AI decades ago and while it was under a different paradigm, she keeps up also after having been retired for 20+ years (this could also have something to do with the fact that her daughter Annika is a professor of computer science at Uppsala University). Yvonne also shared some advice to our ph.d. students, some gossip and we also unfortunately found out "Cecilia was her favourite" :-)

I can very much recommend others to organise an academic family reunion. This was a very informal event, Yvonne has supervised other ph.d. students both in Stockholm and in Linköping, but we were happy to limit this event to only people who work at KTH (with a "guest appearance" from Christer who was our MacGuffin - "an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself"). Christer, who was the "prime mover" and the reason we got together, just had time to chat for a short while with Yvonne before he left and went to Amazon's Stockholm office to "attend a 6-hour meeting in Phoenix, Arizona". But all in all, a lovely social event and a really nice afternoon/evening!

Yvonne and her "academic grand-children"; ph.d. students Arjun, Aksel and Sofie in my home.

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I'm back (after a 2.5 year long hiatus)

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This is the first blog post since the summer of 2022. The previous blog post described the overland journey (train, bus) to the The 8th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). I have since attended the The 9th ICT4S conference (beginning of June 2023 in Rennes, France) and I was co-chair of the 10th ICT4S conference in Stockholm together with my colleague Elina Eriksson (end of June 2024).

Much else has happened since of which the single most important thing to mention here is that we (again me and Elina) are responsible for a new masters programme in Sustainable Digitalisation that started this academic year (e.g. in Aug/Sept 2024). Planning, starting and continuing to develop the programme and teaching individual courses in the programme has and will keep us busy for years to come so this is obviously a topic I will return to many many times in future blog posts.

The topic of this blog post is however a meta-topic, namely why there has been such a long hiatus and what the plans ahead are. 

1) Why haven't I written any blog posts for such a long time?

Here's the problem - I very much like to write/blog but I get carried away. Some blog posts become humungous. I'm not sure anyone reads them from start to end and it takes a hell of long time to write them. I don't know which is my longest blog post - there are many that are long - but this open letter from 2016 might, off the top of my head, very well be the longest text I've ever written here as it's more than 6500 words long - which is the same length as some academic articles... 

So my problem is that I blog and then progressively become more ambitious and over time spend more time writing longer texts. The hobby/activity of blogging then takes a lot of time (time that could have been spend reading or doing something else), it progressively becomes a burden and I end up suddenly taking an unplanned break. There have been several such breaks since I started to blog back in 2010, but these breaks have usually been "only" 3-9 months long. Over time, say during the last 20 years, I have just become progressively more busy in general and thus have had a harder time justifying spending (a lot of) time blogging.

2) What do I plan to blog about?

I will continue to blog about anything I feel like writing about, but almost all blog posts will in one way or another relate to and pertain to my work (job? calling?). A blog post could relate to courses and to teaching, to our new masters programme, to books I've read, to academic articles that I read or that I write or perhaps to a seminar, a workshop, a conference, a course or some other activity I have attend.

3) How often will I publish blog posts?

I will as always follow the plan I outlined in my very first September 2010 blog post, "Blog purpose and history". That means I still aim to write at least one blog post per week (probably Sundays) and at the most two blog posts per week (the second will then probably be published mid-week). 

This blog post is, by the way, blog post 605 since I started blogging 14 1/3 years ago. Despite several breaks, that's still a respectable 40+ blog posts per year on average - although the most active years were 2016, 2013 and 2014 when I wrote 91, 89 and 84 blog posts respectively. 

4) How will I make sure there is continuity? 

I have two "inventions" that I hope will increase continuity (e.g. no 6-month long blog breaks ahead). 

The first is that I will set a timer for 60 minutes before I start to write a blog post. A blog post should not take longer than 60 minutes to write (but could of course take shorter time to write). That means blog posts will be shorter than they have sometimes-often been, and I think that's all for the better. Not only do I not have time to write looong blog posts – you feel you don't have the time to read them... 

I guess it could be that I spend an hour writing the text and then some additional time with "post-production"; finding a nice image to illustrate the blog post, linking up the text, formatting and reading the text from beginning to end and other types of minor fixing.

The second is that I have decided to start with "Bullet Journaling" (sometimes referred to as "BuJo", see the image above). Some of my colleagues have done it for years and I will give it a try. I got a bullet journal as a Christmas present (I gave it to myself). That means I will set up an Index, a Future Log, a Monthly Log, a Weekly Log and a Daily Log as well as learn enough about the BuJo lingo and practices to get going. One of the BuJo tasks to keep track of on a weekly basis is then to write 1-2 blog posts, but the fact that I will better keep track of what needs to be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis also means I can easily get inspiration about what to write about in the weekly blog post by just scanning these logs to get an overview of what I've done lately. The trick is to hold back and not over-exert myself (make sure I write no more than one or maximum two blog posts per week and make sure I spend no more than an hour writing any single blog post. Including this blog post (≈ 1150 words).

If you want to know more about Bullet Journaling (I'm a newbie), there's bulletjournal.com, a collection of 21 YouTube videos (3 hours in total) as well as of course also The Book by Bullet Journal inventor Ryder Carroll, "The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future" from 2018. I might buy the book in a few months if I find the method useful and want to learn more.

5) What next?

The tempo at work is hectic and there will be much to write about in January and during the remainder of the spring term. Some texts will probably also have a "retrospective" angle that will help bridge the 2.5 year long gap. I will write about my upcoming train trip to the continent (January) and about the two courses I myself will take during the spring term (both start in January). 

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Traveling in style by train to ICT4S 2022 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria)

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This is the trip we made from Stockholm to Plovdiv (Bulgaria) by train to attend the ICT4S conference.

Me and my colleagues Elina Eriksson and Arjun Menon took the train from Stockholm to Plovdiv, Bulgaria to attend the The 8th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S'22). The next blog post will treat the conference itself but this blog post is only discusses the trip (which was an adventure in itself). We hopped on the train Friday June 10 at 16.15 (but the train was delayed so actually more than one hour later) and arrived to Plovdiv Sunday June 12 at 15.00.

Elina took on the responsibility to book the trip and I commend her for her work - because it wasn't easy. KTH Royal Institute of Technology has procured a travel agency, Egencia, and we are mandated to use their services. We are indeed thankful for that in our research project Flight since they have (or should have) complete data about KTH air travel, but they are unfortunately not very good at catering to people who want to find alternative ways to travel (e.g. train). The problem is that as KTH employees we are mandated to use Egencia, but they are (apparently) not mandated to give us good service.

The best (or perhaps indeed the only) sensible way to book a trip by train is currently to do the research yourself and then send screen shots to Egencia so they can charge KTH for booking the trip we tell them to book. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal for a travel agency and I'm considering starting one myself. It would in fact be hard to not do a better job when it comes to booking trains than the "service" Egencia currently offers us. What I personally don't understand is how Egencia could win the bid to be our travel agency, but I guess they do fine with air travel and that train travel is not on the table when KTH procures a travel agency. That would then mean they can do a shoddy job booking trains as long as they don't screw up air travel. It has happened that they (probably) use the Deutsche Bahn website and book whatever option comes up first, even if it is totally unreasonable like suggesting a trip by train from Stockholm to Amsterdam where you have to change trains 10 times (true story!). 

In this particular case they followed our (e.g. Elina's) instructions and booked trips from Stockholm to Berlin (direct train with a sleeper car Friday 16 - Saturday 05.30) and then a train from Berlin to Vienna (Saturday 08 - 18). Both trains were delayed so it was lucky we had planned the trip with some slack between the trains!

Me and Arjun waiting for the train in Hamburg

Elina. In Germany you have to use face masks on all trains (not the case in Sweden)

Our travel agency Egencia could not give us adequate help traveling from Vienna to Bulgaria - they couldn't even book tickets with the bus operator (Arda Tur) that Elina found for them and that operated a direct bus line between Vienna and Plovdiv (Saturday 21 - Sunday 15). That meany we (Elina) had to book these tickets. The smaller problem that follows is that we (Elina) had to pay for the tickets in advance and only later get money back from KTH. The bigger problem is that when we book the tickets ourselves it's basically no longer a business trip where we can call the travel agency and get help should any problems arise. Due to train delays (a wildfire somewhere in front of the train in southern Germany) we arrived to Vienna not three but only one hour before the bus left and we had to hurry to buy food and take a taxi to the bus station - but we made it and arrived in time to Plovdiv to have dinner with Ivano Malavolta from VU Amsterdam (Elina's doctoral consortium co-chair)

The bus trip was better than expected. While there was no toilet on the bus, the bus stopped every 3-4 hours so people could go to the bathroom, buy drinks and food, or in the case of everybody else on the bus, have a smoke. At these pit stops we also discovered that there were many other bus lines that started in Germany or even further away (Italy, Netherlands, UK) and that criss-crossed Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Balkans with a fine-grained network of bus lines to a wealth of cities I had never heard of. 

Macedonian bus company Hak Komerc operating a bus line that starts in Italy

The one thing that didn't work that well was sleeping on the bus as the seats were not very comfortable. There were however not that many people on the bus so we could spread out a bit, but that didn't make up for the fact that you couldn't recline the seats very much. None of us got enough sleep on the bus and I felt stiff from the not too comfortable seats. 

The scariest moment on the trip was when we realized the bus from Vienna to Plovdiv travelled through Serbia. I'm currently waiting for my new passport (post-Covid waiting times are extreme in Sweden), but I have a "national identity card" that can be used within all EU countries - but Serbia is not an EU countries and we didn't realize the route would take us there. Phd student Arjun (with an Indian passport) had the same problem and we were both afraid we would be stranded on the motorway between Hungary and Serbia in the middle of the night. That fortunately didn't happen, they just let us through without any problems at all but it was still a bit scary. This is what Arjun wrote about the border crossings in our research group's Slack channel:

In the destination country [Bulgaria] at last.. further adventures ensued at passport controls between Hungary and Serbia & Serbia and Bulgaria, where my ‘exotic’ passport caused quite a flurry -

The Hungarian border police took a solid 3-4 minutes and meticulously went through each page of my passport and compared each photo to my face, before finally (and very reluctantly) deciding to let me leave the EU

The Serbian border control were more inclusive and merely said “Oh! Indian”, in the tones of a 5-year old  pointing out an airplane in the sky to their parents

The Bulgarian border control exclaimed “Indian! Where are you going” before running off with my visa and passport, presumably to show off to his colleagues - “Look guys! I got an Indian passport! Have you guys even seen one?!”. Mercifully, he returned and I'm now in Bulgaria and back in the EU.

All in all our trip from Stockholm to Plovdiv took less than 48 hours! Months in advance we consciously chose to frame it as an "adventure" - and it worked! It was a great adventure and we enjoyed it a lot. It's however a great advantage to travel with others, it wouldn't have been fun at all to travel all by yourself. The one thing that didn't work was nailing down the details of the trip in advance. Our plan was to have a route ready at least one, but preferably two or three months in advance and then spread it through the community in the hope that other participants would join up in Denmark, Germany or Austria (where the direct bus departed). Due to all the diddling and mails being sent back and forth to the travel agency we never did get around to do that. 

We also had a great idea for what the conference organizers could (should) have done when planning the conference. They should have booked two buses where conference attendees could have booked a seat. These two buses should then leave from central locations with good train connections and go directly to Plovdiv. One bus would catch people from Northern Europe and the suggestion is that it should depart from Vienna. The other bus would catch people from Western and Southern Europe and could depart from, say, Venice. It could even be that these two bus routes could join and merge in Zagreb (capital of Croatia). Zagreb is exactly a four-hour bus trip away from both Vienna and Venice and the trip from Zagreb to Plovdiv would then take an additional 10 hours (plus breaks etc.). That would surely have been the best way to travel to the conference and to arrive at the conference with an instant network of friends.

Furure scenario: hop on the conference bus either in Vienna or Vencie and go directly to Plovdiv together with other conference attendees!

This is surely how we all should travel to "local" conferences in the future, right? For further reference, see this blog post about the future of academic travel. The application was turned down but I think we will submit a new application within a year.

Last note: all three legs of the trip (Sth-Hamburg-Vienna-Plovdiv) had wifi, but only the trip from Hamburg to Vienna had good rather than shaky wifi and this is something that needs to be improved so that people can work during the trip! 

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Feel the energy! (approved research project)

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We just found out our application for a two-year research project was approved! The money comes from The Swedish Energy Agency's call "Design for an energy efficient everyday life" (Design för energieffektiv vardag). 

It is my colleague Björn Hedin's application "Feel the energy! Tactile learning about everyday energy use" that got 4.7 MSEK in funding and the project itself will run between October 2022 to December 2024. 

While Björn unfortunately does not work at our department any longer (but rather at the Department of Learning in Engineering Science), we continue to do research together and this application is an example of that. The project money will be used for hiring a phd student who will work in the project, but it will also pay for 5% of my time and ≈ 25% of current phd project Arjun Menon's time. Arjun works at my department but Björn (who thus works elsewhere) is his advisor. Besides Björn himself an additional three persons are also part of the project and I expect I will meet them for the first time during the mid-September project kick-off:

- Daniel Rosqvist is "Science Center Manager" at the Technical Museum and has many years of experience in designing museum-based learning activities. Daniel also attended Björn's phd course on "Learning behavior" (about creating engaging learning experiences).

- Malin Lindstaf works as a project leader at the municipal energy and climate advisors (Energi- och klimatrådgivning, EKR) in the City of Stockholm. EKR are in close contact with citizens and can help the project identify knowledge gaps. EKR also has mobile energy-related exhibitions where the concepts developed in this project could be integrated and tested.

- Anders Blomqvist works at the same institution as Björn (Department of Learning in Engineering Science) but at another division, "House of Science" (Vetenskapens Hus). House of Science has 80 000 visitors per year and is another venue/platform where we can test concepts that are developed in the project. 

So this is a very strong team, but what then are we actually going to do in the project? The English-language project abstract states:

The public’s understanding regarding their own role in the energy system and how they themselves can influence their situation is very low - so-called “Energy literacy”. Energy issues are perceived as boring, abstract and complicated, and research shows that traditional learning about energy consumption quickly falls into oblivion and has little effect on individuals' choices and behaviors.

In this project, we want to explore how people's knowledge and engagement to everyday energy issues are affected if they actually get to “feel” the energy physically. We will develop a flexible concept for portable “exhibitions” with associated pedagogical instructions that can be used in classrooms, exhibitions, foyers and at festivals. With the help of these, participants can playfully interact with models of real objects and situations, where abstract quantities such as energy, power and carbon footprint are represented by the weight and and volume of physical objects.

Previous generations often had a direct physical relationship to their energy use (Borgmann 1987). They cut and carried firewood, dug ditches and used their legs to move around. Modern campaigns such as "two holes in the wall" (e.g. you don't need to know or care where the electricity comes from) have deliberately encouraged people not to worry or care about developing a mature conception of energy and energy use. The energy is instead available wherever and whenever you need it - as if it has sprung forth from a cornucopia of eternal and endless energy. We have become accustomed to energy being inexpensive, abundantly available and ready to be used at the slightest whim ("at the flick of the switch"). This has also led to low levels of "energy literacy" among the general population. An important objective of the project is thus to design and explore the possibility of helping people regain a more direct, physical connection to energy. The hope is that participants can gain a greater understanding of the large (but various) amounts of energy that different everyday chores require, an increased understanding of the importance of managing their energy use as well as knowledge that will help them "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel".

I will work 5% in the project and mostly as an observer/pollinator between this project and my own art + science + communication project "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus: Visualising our energy footprint". I expect I will also be helpful primarily in writing articles, in supervising bachelor's and master's theses and of course also by designing and testing workshop contents and formats (these are three of the project deliverables). I will surely want to apply my evolving Art of Hosting skills to the design of new workshop formats! My previous blog post is about using Art of Hosting methods for designing a workshop format for the Homo Colossus project and it's also very good that also Arjun who will work in the project took the same three-day intensive Art of Hosting course half a year ago!

Last but not least, the project has budgeted money to buy a 3D printer and I look forward to see how it will come to use in the project!

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