Articles I've read lately (March)

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I'm waay behind on summing up the articles I read during the spring. Despite being half a year late, I still find it useful to sum up and publish blog posts about the articles I've read "lately". Here is the previous blog post (about the articles I read back in February).

Reading articles are on a hiatus right now because of a heavy work load. I have no time to read articles at the moment, so I might eventually catch up with my blog posts...!

Batch/week 1 - Texts from the ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) conference

Comment: I read a batch of ICT4S articles in February in preparation for the then-upcoming ICT4S conference. In March I read a new batch of articles that for one or another reason had caught my interest at the conference. These articles were much better than last month's.

- Blumendorf, M. (2013). Building Sustainable Smart Homes. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 151. */ Was awarded the "best paper" prize at the conference. "Can we make smart homes sustainable or sustainable homes smart?" /* 

- Cho, E. J., & Rogel, L. (2013). Urban social sustainability through the web. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 167. */ Interesting study of how an online meeting place was integrated into a condominium and how it created "better relationships between neighbors" (referred to as "urban social sustainability"). A little strange though since the second author both lives in the condominium and was the driving force behind the whole intervention, but the references to further research are very good! /*

- Fors, P., & Lennerfors, T. T. (2013). Translating Green IT: the case of the Swedish Green IT Audit. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 208. */ The study is part of "the interpretative turn in organizational studies". On how an idea (Green IT) is transformed into something that companies can act upon through the creation of methods and standards (in this case The Green IT Audit) /*

- Kramers, A., Höjer, M., Lövehagen, N., & Wangel, J. (2013). ICT for Sustainable Cities: How ICT Can Support an Environmentally Sustainable Development in Cities. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich (pp. 183–188). */ How cities can use ICT to reduce energy use. Ambitious study. /*

- Laubacher, R. (2013). Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Climate Change: The Climate CoLab. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 1. */ Supershort paper accompanying one of the keynotes. Very interesting. /*

- Lövehagen, N., & Bondesson, A. (2013). Evaluating sustainability of using ICT solutions in smart cities–methodology requirements. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 175. */ Research by Ericsson Research "based on an extensive literature study which covered almost 200 papers and reports on assessments, indicators, methodoligies and evaluation tools related to sustainability, ICT and cities". /*

- Mankoff, J. (2013). Defining an Agenda for Computational Sustainability. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 4. */ Supershort paper accompanying one of the keynotes. Interesting. /*

- Spreng, D. (2013). Interactions between Energy, Information and Growth. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich (pp. 6–7). */ Supershort paper accompanying one of the keynotes. Very interesting. /*

- Svane, Ö. (2013). Energy Efficiency in Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm through ICT and smarter infrastructure–survey and potentials. ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, February 14-16, 2013, 190. */ "Hammarby Sjöstad is seen as one of the world's highest profile examples of Sustainable City Development". So, what happened to the ICT and environmental goals and visions that were formulated as part of the project? As it turns out the answer is "nothing much". "In one case the interactive ICT for management was just prepared for [but never installed], in another it was accidentally disconnected." /*

Batch/week 2 - Articles about sustainability from the HCI community

Comment: These articles are the results of following up earlier stuff I have read in this area.

- Dillahunt, T., Mankoff, J., Paulos, E., & Fussell, S. (2009). It’s not all about green: Energy use in low-income communities. Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous computing (pp. 255–264). ACM. */ A study of energy saving behaviors, values and beliefs in US low-income households as well as external factors and challenges. Most such studies are otherwise performed on well-off households living in detached houses. /*

- Dourish, P. (2010). HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 1–10). ACM. */ "This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. [...] this paper explores some of the reasons for the dominance of individually-focused "persuasive applications" and search for an alternative. /*

- Foth, M., Paulos, E., Satchell, C., & Dourish, P. (2009). Pervasive computing and environmental sustainability: two conference workshops. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 8(1), 78–81. */ Part of a special issue on environmental sustainability. The main question is: how can pervasive computing and HCI make a significant contribution to improve sustainability? /*

- Nathan, L. P., Blevis, E., Friedman, B., Hasbrouck, J., & Sengers, P. (2008). Beyond the hype: sustainability & HCI. CHI’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2273–2276). ACM. */ A panel about the role of sustainability in the HCI field. /*

- Paulos, E., Foth, M., Satchell, C., Kim, Y., Dourish, P., & Choi, J. H.-J. (2008). Ubiquitous Sustainablity: Citizen Science and Activism. Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Paper 200. */ On a workshop at UbiComp 2008 about grassroots activism, citizen science and environmental concerns. /*

- Schuler, D. (2009). Communities, technology, and civic intelligence. Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 61–70). ACM. */ Schuler introduces the term "civic intelligence" to propose, describe and explore "collective intelligence that [is] socially and environmentally ameliorative". /*

Batch/week 3 - Texts about competitive computer gaming

Comment: Same as last month, the articles below were part of reading up and gearing up to write about sports, sportification and competitions together with Daniel Svensson.

- Cheung, G., & Huang, J. (2011). Starcraft from the stands: understanding the game spectator. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 763–772). ACM. */ "we focus on the spectator, who is emerging as an important stakeholder in video games". The authors identify no less than nine personas from the 100+ stories they have collected; the bystander, the curios, the inspired, the pupil, the unsatisfied, the entertained, the assistant, the commentator and the crowd. /*

- Crawford, G., & Gosling, V. (2009). More than a game: sports-themed video games & player narratives. Sociology of Sport Journal, 26(1), 50–66. */ A study of how sports-themed video games are used and located within the everyday lives of gamers. The actual data consists of 65 interviews. /*

- Rambusch, J., Jakobsson, P., & Purgman, D. (2007). Exploring E-sports: A case study of game play in Counter-strike. Situated play: The 2007 world conference of Digital Games Research Association (pp. 157–164). DiGRA. */ I re-read my own paper but noticed that my name had been misspelled somewhere in the global authorship supply chain ecosystem. In the paper we discuss cognitive, cultural, economical and technological aspects of playing (competing) in the computer game Counter-strike. /* 

- Taylor, N. T. (2011). Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 3(1). */ The paper is based on ethnographic research of North American competitive Halo 3 players and draws on the author's doctoral research. /*

- Taylor, T. L., & Witkowski, E. (2010). This is how we play it: what a mega-LAN can teach us about games. Proceedings of the fifth international conference on the foundations of digital games (pp. 195–202). ACM. */ The paper is based on participant observation and informal interviews at two Dreamhack events (2005 and 2009). Reflections on gamer identities, women gamers, spectatorship and spatiality during the three-day long events. /*

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