torsdag 5 januari 2017

Follow-up (autumn 2016)

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This is what I wrote in my previous follow-up blog post half a year ago:

"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 [...] some blog posts don't generate follow-up blog posts even when they "should"."

From having written general follow-up blog posts about this-and-that, my previous (July 2016) follow-up was exclusively concerned with following up the status of various academic texts ("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 blog post will do the same. This year has been very productive in terms of the output of academic texts but there's a high probability next year "will go to eleven".

This follow-up blog post will be exclusively devoted to following up the various writing projects that I have worked on during the second half of the year and they together add up to no less than 25 different texts (journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and workshop proposals - all chronicled below). I do however not include papers that I'm working on (that haven't been submitted) yet or rejected papers that we will but haven't yet had time to work on (with the purpose of resubmitting).

I have organized the papers in chronological order in terms of when they were (or will be) presented/published or alternatively when they were rejected/withdrawn. I also link back to the original blog posts of the paper in question. I have furthermore 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 and reviewed but the paper was rejected
- Withdrawn (plus justification of withdrawal)
- Finished, submitted and currently under review or conditionally accepted and being re-written at the moment (could later be rejected, could 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 blog post is the comprehensive resource to keep up with what I've been writing during the last six months as well as what has been published or presented (or rejected) during that same period. There are only a few ways that papers can "get off" this list; it can be published, it can be rejected or it can be withdrawn. That's it. No less than 13 texts are re-runs of writing projects that I wrote about in my follow-up half a year ago and 12 of the texts below represent brand new writing projects.


- 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) back in February but I only found out in August that it had been rejected. We will rework the article but a planned meeting was "kidnapped" by the acceptance of another paper by the same authors (see below). I wrote about this submission 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."

- The proposed journal article "The green democratic energy narrative" (Daniel Pargman, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, Karin Bradley) was rejected for the Energy Research & Social Science (ERSS) special issue on "Narratives and storytelling in energy and climate change research". They received numerous submissions to the special issue and when they instituted a strict one-paper-per-first-author policy this paper got the short shrift while another paper was invited to the special issue. I wrote about the proposed article 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 workshop "Computing within Limits: Visions of computing beyond Moore's law" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Lorenz Hilty, Adrian Friday, Chris Preist, Teresa Cerratto Pargman) was successfully held on Monday August 29 as part of the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). I wrote about the workshop (proposal) on the blog in April and wrote about the workshop itself in August. 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?" (pdf) (Daniel Pargman, Edward Ahlsén, Cecilia Engelbart) was presented at the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) and the paper as well as the conference proceedings are now available online. I wrote about the paper on the blog when it was submitted in April. The paper was in fact presented twice at the conference since it was one of six best paper award nominees (it didn't win). I have since reached out to one of the paper's reviewers and we are working on extending this conference paper with the goal of eventually writing a journal article (see further below). "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" (pdf) (Daniel Pargman, Björn Hedin, Elina Eriksson) was presented at the 8th Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD2016) in September and the full proceedings have recently been published online. I wrote about the paper on the blog when it was submitted in May and about thxe conference in September. "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?”" (pdf) (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Anna Björklund, Anna Kramers, Karin Edvardsson Björnberg) was presented at the 8th Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD2016) in September and the full proceedings have recently been published online. I wrote about the paper on the blog when it was submitted in May and about the conference in September. "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 proposed book chapter "Limits to moneycomputing" (Daniel Pargman, Daniel Berg) was conditionally accepted for inclusion in the upcoming (2017) book "Digital Technology and Sustainability" but was withdrawn due to a high work load as well as other complications with the text itself. The current plan is to rewrite and submit a shorter version to a conference during the first half of 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 workshop "HCI and UN's Sustainable Development Goals: Responsibilities, Barriers and Opportunities" (pdfACM Digital Library) (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman, Oliver Bates, Maria Normark, Jan Gulliksen, Mikael Anneroth, Johan Berntsson) was 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 and a blog post about the workshop itself in October. 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 journal article "At Odds with a Worldview - Teaching Limits at a technical university" (pdf, ACM Digital Library) (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson) was published in the November-December issue of Interactions magazine in a "special topic" on "Sustainable HCI education". My UCI ex-colleagues Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson and Don Patterson put together that special topic and me and Elina got an invitation to write a piece for it. I wrote about our submission on the blog in July but did not in fact write a separate blog post when the Interactions issue was published. The published text looks ok in html but gorgeous as pdf file. "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."

- I submitted three paper to the notoriously selective CHI conference and one was rejected. The other two papers were accepted and information about them can be found further below. Due to the double-blind reviewing process, I have not and will not disclose the title of the paper or who my co-authors are, but we are planning on rewriting the paper and submitting it to another conference during the first quarter of 2017.

- The compact two-page (Swedish-language) discussion paper "Sagan om examensringen: En akademisk tragedi" [Lord of the graduation ring: An academic tragedy] (pdf) (Björn Hedin, Daniel Pargman, Olle Bälter) was presented at the the 9th [Swedish] Pedagogical Inspiration Conference in mid-December and is available on the Internet (pdf file). It's about a student-from-hell who cheated himself through our education and it has taken us more than 5 years to muster the energy to write this short paper. I wrote about our submission on the blog in September "If the organizational benevolence [of the university] is exploited, this can have consequences that seem unreasonable. If the organizational benevolence is maximally exploited, this can have absurd and Kafkaesque consequences. In this text we want to, based on a concrete case, raise questions about how we in our roles as responsible for educational programmes should handle such conflicts."

- The proposed conference paper "Useless games for a sustainable world" (Daniel Pargman, Björn Hedin) has been accepted for presentation at a workshop on "Uselessness" that is organized by the University of Amsterdam/Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at that will be held at the end of March 2017. Me and Björn have had amazing discussion leading to counterintuitive conclusions and we think this paper is a springboard to at least one future full papers. I wrote about our submission on the blog in October. "Are computer games “useful” or are they “useless” when regarded through a sustainability lens and against a backdrop of problematising the relationship between sustainability and consumption?".

- The proposed conference paper "“I have no use for useless PhDs”: Interrogating the notion of uselessness in techno-scientific culture" (Leif Dahlberg, Daniel Pargman) has been accepted for presentation at a workshop on "Uselessness" that is organized by the University of Amsterdam/Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at that will be held at the end of March 2017. The real reason this paper is being written is because the workshop and the paper offers me and Leif the opportunity to work and to write something together for the very first time. I wrote about our submission on the blog in October. "What is the understanding of uselessness in contemporary techno-scientific culture? We investigate this question through interviews with three high-powered, prominent professors at Sweden’s oldest, largest and (arguably) most prestigious technical university, KTH Royal Institute of Technology".

- The proposed conference paper "Using low-fi user-centered design methods to overcome barriers to adopting photovoltaics in Sweden" (Robin Chanapai, Daniel Pargman) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper proposal builds on the master's thesis that Robin Chanapai wrote this past spring with me as supervisor. I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "In this paper we [...] discuss how the use of low-fidelity user-centered design methods and the resulting user interfaces can be utilized to find out more about, and build upon the positive motivations of homeowners’ interest in investing in PV [solar cells/Photovoltaics]".

- The proposed conference paper "ICT support for collective energy management in housing cooperatives" (Hanna Hasselqvist, Daniel Pargman, Cristian Bogdan, Isaac Rondon) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper proposal builds on the master's thesis that Isaac Rondon wrote this past spring with me as supervisor and Hanna as principal.  I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "We have studied energy management in housing cooperatives, a common form of housing in the Nordic countries, where the household energy consumption (heating, hot water and electricity use) depends on collective decisions that affect all the housing cooperative members".

- The proposed conference paper "Municipal climate and energy advisors: A way forward or a “Mission: Impossible”?" (Björn Hedin, Daniel Pargman, Henrik Artman) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper proposal builds work in the research project "Improved energy counseling and energy habits by Quantified Self Assisted Advisory". I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "Sweden has chosen to finance “municipal energy and climate advisors” for providing impartial locally adapted energy and climate advice to individuals. [...] Our conclusion is that [they] harbour the potential to serve an important purpose, but that the regulations surrounding them make [their work into a] “mission: impossible”."

- The proposed conference paper "When good intentions are not enough: How energy-stingy screen technologies can lead to higher consumption" (Daniel Pargman, Oliver Bates) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper is our first attempt of extending the 2016 ICT4S conference paper "Designing for sustainability: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?". It is also the first time I write something together with Oliver Bates. I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "We argue that when considering the environmental impact of innovative, energy-saving ICTs, the allure is to replace old devices at an accelerated pace. However, the energy savings alone do not come anyway near offsetting the energy cost of manufacturing these new devices."

- The proposed conference paper "Coalworld: Envisioning a world with half the oil" (Daniel Pargman, Mikael Höök) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper is an attempt at summarizing and dissemination information about the multi-article Coalworld project. I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "We argue that when considering the environmental impact of innovative, energy-saving ICTs, the allure is to replace old devices at an accelerated pace. However, the energy savings alone do not come anyway near offsetting the energy cost of manufacturing these new devices."

- The proposed conference paper "Homo colossus’ energy slaves" (Daniel Pargman) has been submitted to the conference Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science. The conference will be held outside of Barcelona in the beginning of April 2017. This paper calculates, conceptualizes and visualizes the vast amounts of energy we consume in our daily lives. I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "We specifically propose the use of two strong concepts to help us visualize our extravagant use of energy, namely the concept of “energy slaves” (Nikiforuk 2014) and the idea that each of us is a “homo colossus” (Catton 1986, 1987). [...] This paper illustrates how even the poorest of us nowadays have an oversized ecological footprint, but how the richest 1% or 10% on Earth are creatures of mind-boggling proportions".

- The journal article "What if there was only half the oil? Envisioning the consequences of a global peak in oil production in Coalworld" (previous title: "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 conditionally accepted for publication in the Energy Research & Social Science (ER&SS) special issue on "Narratives and storytelling in energy and climate change research". The deadline for the final version is February 10 and we now have some work to do based on the reviews we recently received. 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 conference paper "Means and Ends in Human-Computer Interaction: Sustainability through Disintermediation" (Barath Raghavan, Daniel Pargman) has been accepted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. This is a Big Thing for people in HCI. This is also the long-promised companion paper to our 2014 paper "Rethinking sustainability in computing: From buzzword to non-negotiable limitations". I wrote about the paper on the blog in December. "In this paper we observe that taking these broader contexts into account yields a fundamentally different way to think about sustainable interaction design, one in which the designer’s focus must be on a) ecological limits, b) creating designs and artifacts that do not further a cornucopian paradigm, and c) fundamental human needs."

- The conference paper "The (Un)sustainability of Imagined Future Information Societies" (Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson, Mattias Höjer, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, Luciane Aguiar Borges) has been conditionally accepted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. I wrote about the paper on the blog in December. Do also note that this is in fact a reworked and improved version of a previously rejected paper. "This paper describes the results of a research project in the intersection of HCI and Futures Studies as well as in the intersection between “the future information society” and sustainability. We discuss examples of what future information societies could look like and what the impact of these societies would be in terms of 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 2016 and the special issue will be published sometime in 2017 (probably the first half), but we currently have no further information. Work on the text started a long time ago and I wrote about the paper on the blog in June 2015 and then again in November 2015. The lead times are absurdly long... "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."

- Or 500-word abstract "Estranging Energy: Teaching Abstract Concepts through Making Strange" (Jerry Määttä, Daniel Pargman) has been accepted for presentation in the academic track of the 75th World Science Fiction Convention next year (Helsinki, August). The theme of the academic track is “100 Years of Estrangement” and this is my first project together with Science Fiction studies literary scholar Jerry Määttä. My understanding is that we are not required to write a paper, but that is still our intention. I wrote about our submission on the blog in November. "Few people intuitively grasp [the energy use and carbon emissions] of our modern, high-energy technological lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to examine and discuss [...] the use of images, metaphors, and estrangement, enabling especially students to defamiliarise abstract concepts such as energy"

- The mostly-finished book chapter "On the inherent contradictions of teaching sustainability at a technical university" (Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman) has been conditionally 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). 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."


That's it for now but I assume I will write another follow-up six months from now. Remember, there are only three ways that a texts get off this list; either the paper/article has been presented/published (7 texts) or it has been rejected (3 texts) or it has been withdrawn (1 text).

Everything else is "in play" (14 texts that are either light yellow, darker yellow, orange or light green) and will for sure appear in the next follow-up. Texts that are rejected or withdrawn can also appear if they are repurposed and reworked and then resubmitted and I expect the next list to be considerably longer as there are many more writing projects planned for the spring term (not the least due to the fact that have less teaching).
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