Follow-up (spring 2016)

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Ongoing or long-term projects usually generate follow-up blog posts. A submission to a conference will (if accepted) later generate a blog post about that conference. An ongoing research project will generate a new blog post some three, six or twelve months later. But I mostly write about things as they happen ("snapshots") and some blog posts don't generate follow-up blog posts even when they "should". I have tried to make amends by sometimes summing things up by going back half a year or even a whole year to look for "loose ends" to follow up and tie together. I've done it half a dozen times, but not lately (the last follow-up blog post was written in January 2015).

This spring (January - June) has seen the blog fill up with posts about various academic papers; the name of the game has been a constant and hectic production of academic texts reaching almost-hysterical levels of text production in May and June.

This follow-up blog post will exclusively follow up the various writing projects that I have worked on during the spring term (including two workshop proposals). They together add up to no less than 18 different texts (journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and workshop proposals). I have below organised them in chronological order of when they were (or will be) presented/published), linked back to the original blog posts and have also added helpful color-coding to the titles of the papers as follows:

- Published/presented (100% finished, no work remains to be done)
- Accepted for publication/presentation, 100% finished but has not yet been published (journal articles), presented (conference papers) or held (conference workshops)
- Finished, submitted, reviewed but was rejected
- Finished, submitted and currently under review (might be rejected, might be accepted as-is or might need further work)
- Submitted and conditionally accepted for publication but currently only exists as an (extended) abstract. The major part of the work remains to be done
- Submitted but currently only exists as an (extended) abstract. Acceptance (or rejection) is pending. The major part of the work remains to be done (if accepted)

This is the comprehensive resource to keep up with what I've been writing during the last six months. It's also a great resource for me (when I need to update my CV, for finding links to conferences/special issues of journals or for to have at hand the next time I negotiate my salary with my boss)! Here are the texts:


- The journal article "The Internet at the eco-village: Performing sustainability in the twenty-first century" (Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Daniel Pargman, Bonnie Nardi) was published in the online journal First Monday at the end of May and is available on the Internet. Work on the text started a very long time ago (more than two years ago). I wrote about it on the blog in May. "Is the digital infrastructure and its footprint an ideological blind spot for recently emerging ecological communities, including eco-villages?."

- The conference paper "Limits to the Sharing Economy" (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson, Adrian Friday) was presented at the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits (ACM LIMITS) in June and is published in the conference proceedings. I wrote about it on the blog in May. "In this paper ... we take a critical stance and will elaborate on the intersection between the Sharing Economy and Limits (including pinpointing potential conflicts)."

- The conference paper "Refactoring Society: Systems Complexity in an Age of Limits" (Barath Raghavan, Daniel Pargman) was also presented at the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits (ACM LIMITS) in June and is published in the conference proceedings. I wrote about it on the blog in May. "In this paper we attempt to answer a fundamental question: what is the appropriate response to excessive sociotechnical complexity?."

- The conference paper "Whose future is it anyway?: Limits within Policy Modeling" (Somya Joshi, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Adreas Gazis, Daniel Pargman) was again presented at the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits (ACM LIMITS) in June and is published in the conference proceedings. I wrote about it on the blog in May. "Between the euphoric techno-utopian rhetoric of the boundless potential of BOLD [Big Open Linked Data] innovations and the dystopian view of the dangers of such innovations (e.g. ubiquitous surveillance etc.), this paper offers a critical understanding of the boundaries that are traversed by the implementation of BOLD within policy modeling." 

- The workshop "Computing within Limits: Visions of computing beyond Moore's law" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Lorenz Hilty, Adrian Friday, Chris Preist, Teresa Cerratto Pargman) will be held on Monday August 29 as part of the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). I wrote about it on the blog in April and then published an invitation in June. The workshop also has a webpage of its own. "What if we will come up against various ecological, material, energetic, and/or societal limits (c.f. “Limits to Growth”, Meadows et. al., 1973) that will also profoundly affect the field of computing in the coming decades?." 

- The conference paper "Designing for Sustainability: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?" (Daniel Pargman, Edward Ahlsén, Cecilia Engelbart) will be presented on Tuesday August 30 at the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). It will be presented again on Wednesday August 31 since it is one of the six nominees for the best paper award. The previous title of the paper was "Next generation screens: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?" and I notice that my last-minute change of title has not (yet) percolated into the conference program. I wrote about it on the blog in April. "This example thus raises important questions about system boundaries and about how to evaluate sustainable (or “sustainable”) technologies." 

- The conference paper "Patterns of Engagement: Using a board game as a tool to address sustainability in engineering educations" (Daniel Pargman, Björn Hedin, Elina Eriksson) will be presented at the 8th Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD2016) in September. I wrote about it on the blog in May. "We here describe how we have worked to overcome students’ (potential) aversion to one particular GDEE [Global Dimension in Engineering Education] topic, sustainability, by incorporating a board game, Gasuco, into the introductory module of a course about “Media Technology and Sustainability”."

- The conference paper "Sustainable development for ICT engineering students - “What's in it for me?”" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Anna Björklund, Anna Kramers, Karin Edvardsson Björnberg) will be presented at the 8th Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD2016) in September. I wrote about it on the blog in May. "In this paper we describe and compare our efforts to plan and teach three introductory courses on SD [Sustainable Development] in three different ICT-related educational programmes at KTH Royal Institute of Technology." 

- The workshop "HCI and UN's Sustainable Development Goals: Responsibilities, Barriers and Opportunities" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Oliver Bates, Maria Normark, Jan Gulliksen, Mikael Anneroth, Johan Berntsson) will be held on Monday October 24 as part of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI’16). I published an invitation to the workshop on the blog in June. The workshop also has a webpage of its own. "In this workshop we want engage everyone who is interested in working towards a sustainable future in terms of and with the UN SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] as a starting point. How can Sustainable HCI be inspired by, and contribute to these goals?." 

- The conference paper "The (Un)sustainability of Imagined Future Information Societies" (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, Mattias Höjer, Luciane Aguiar Borges) was submitted to the Future Scenarios track at the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI’16) but was rejected despite getting an "Overall Rating" of 4, e.g. "Borderline, but somewhat closer to 'accept' than 'reject'". I wrote about it on the blog in May. "This paper emanates from the academic field of futures studies and it describes the results of a research project in the intersection of “the future information society” and sustainability, answering questions such as: what could the future information society look like and what would be the impact of that society be in terms of sustainability?." 

- The conference paper "On the Design of Design Fiction: Exploring Sustainable Computing through Fictional Abstracts" (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson and 13 additional co-authors of which Eric Baumer was most active) was submitted to the Future Scenarios track at the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI’16) but was rejected. It got an "Overall Rating" of 3, e.g. "Borderline, but somewhat closer to 'reject' than 'accept'". I wrote about it on the blog in May. "As prediction of and speculation about the future can help to explore critical alternatives, this paper discusses the practice and value of design fiction through the creation of high-quality fictional abstracts."

- The journal article "At Odds with a Worldview - Teaching Limits at a technical university" (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson) has been accepted for publication in the Interactions magazine special issue on "teaching sustainability". My UCI ex-colleagues Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson and Don Patterson are putting the special issue together and me and Elina got an invitation to write a piece for it. The final version of the text will be submitted with a day or two and it will be published the October-November issue. I wrote about it on the blog in July. "In this paper, we will first elaborate on two approaches to addressing and teaching engineering (computing) students about the environmental and other challenges. We have here chosen to call these two approaches “vanilla” and “strong” sustainability."

- The journal article "The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century" (Karin Bradley, Daniel Pargman) has been accepted for publication in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society's (CJRES) special issue on "Sharing Economies? Theories, practices and impacts". The final version of the journal article was submitted in July and the special issue will be published sometime in 2017. Work on the text started a long time ago and I wrote about it on the blog in June last year and then again in November last year. "This paper aims to make a contribution to the debate on how contemporary collaborative commons, as part of the wider sharing economy, can be understood and supported." 

- The proposed journal article "The green democratic energy narrative" (Daniel Pargman, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, Karin Bradley) has been submitted for publication in the Energy Research & Social Science (ERSS) special issue on "Narratives and storytelling in energy and climate change research". If accepted for inclusion in the special issue, the deadline for the final version of the article is February 2017. I wrote about it on the blog in July. "In this paper, we aim to question and to “defamiliarize” the reader with the familiar story of renewable energy as a unique source of redressing everything that is wrong in society today." 

- The proposed journal article "On the effects of the early 1970’s global peak in oil production" (Daniel Pargman, Joshua Tanenbaum, Elina Eriksson, Mikael Höök, Marcel Pufal, Josefin Wangel) has been submitted for publication in the Energy Research & Social Science (ERSS) special issue on "Narratives and storytelling in energy and climate change research". If accepted for inclusion in the special issue, the deadline for the final version of the article is February 2017. I wrote about it on the blog in July. "Our [paper] takes as its starting point the contrafactual statement “what if there ever only was half the oil in the ground when we started to use it 150 years ago?”". 

- The proposed book chapter "On the inherent contradictions of teaching sustainability at a technical university" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman) has been accepted for inclusion in the upcoming (2017) book "Digital Technology and Sustainability: Acknowledging Paradox, Facing Conflict, and Embracing Disruption" (edited by Mike Hazas and Lisa Nathan). We have as of yet only submitted an extended abstract and the deadline for the first full draft is August 31 and the deadline for the final draft is in April 2017. I wrote both about the book and about the proposed chapter on the blog in July. Paraphrasing the text we handed in only slightly, we said that "As university teachers, we must look at how we teach sustainability. If we teach our students vanilla sustainability, “we’ll achieve only a little” (McKay 2008, p.3) and that’s not good enough."

- The proposed book chapter "Limits to moneycomputing" (Daniel Pargman, Daniel Berg) has been accepted for inclusion in the upcoming (2017) book "Digital Technology and Sustainability: Acknowledging Paradox, Facing Conflict, and Embracing Disruption" (edited by Mike Hazas and Lisa Nathan). We have as of yet only submitted an extended abstract and the deadline for the first full draft is August 31 and the deadline for the final draft is in April 2017. I wrote both about the book and about the proposed chapter on the blog in July. "An increasing number of researchers are contemplating and researching how ICT could be used to increase sustainability in our societies ... Few researchers however study or indeed even consider what is bad about computers in terms of sustainability, i.e. how computers are oftentimes used in ways that contribute to unsustainability."

- The journal article "Pluralizing the future information society" (Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling, Mattias Höjer, Daniel Pargman, Luciane Aguiar Borges) was submitted to the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change (TFSC) in February but we have not yet hear back from them. I wrote about it on the blog in April. "this study shows that there are alternatives to contemporary forecasted futures and exemplifies that ICT can be used to facilitate different societal developments. It is argued that creating parallel possible futures (plural) aids in the process of identifying potential benefits and drawbacks of technological development and situate current decisions in a longer time frame." 

That's about it and that's quite a lot! Some of the texts above (the yellow and orange) might make a comeback and make guest appearances on the blog during the autumn term (August - December).

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