On the challenges of teaching sustainability

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Back in January - exactly four months ago - I wrote a blog post about just having submitted an abstract for an upcoming conference, Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (to be held in Cambridge at the end of September. The conference theme is "Rethinking the engineer" and I wrote a paper together with my colleague Elina Eriksson called "'It's not fair!' - Making students engage in sustainability" and .

The abstract was accepted and we just finished writing the 10-page long paper. In fact, I submitted the paper on Friday and it was huge relief to be finished with it and send it away before the weekend. It's just one of those things that can make you feel that you can actually (and not just nominally) can take the weekend off!

Perhaps most fun in the paper was to write about the tension between teaching "'vanilla' sustainability (every challenge we face constitutes a problem that can be solved) versus 'doomsday' sustainabiliyt (we face predicaments that cannot be solved)". From the paper:

Doomsday sustainability has no “happy chapter” and runs the risk of shocking, depressing or even paralyzing students (see further below), but can however paradoxically also be liberating, since it takes students’ worries seriously instead of glossing over fundamental problems. This perspective could also work as a call to more fundamental rather than superficial action. 
[...] 
One student stated after having taken our course that:

“I was interested in marketing and stuff like that before the course, but now I feel like doing something that is more beneficial to humanity.”

Below is the paper abstract - do get in touch if you want a copy of the whole paper!

Abstract

In this paper, we address the issue of teaching a subject, sustainability, that ideally should permeate the whole engineering education, but at the moment often plays a minor role in the curricula. Here we discuss the tactics of planning and conducting a sustainability course with the explicit goal of truly engaging the students and making an impact on their thinking. Furthermore, we here present a framework that can be used in course planning and analysis. Finally, we discuss how this framework was used in our sustainability course for Media Technology engineering students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the engagement and resulting change in students perception of sustainability. Moreover, we argue that beyond rethinking the engineer and the engineering education, we also need to rethink our roles as university teachers.

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Books I've read recently

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"Books I've read lately" is a recurring topic and here is the previous blog post (same topic, different books). The books below as well as the books in my next blog post are all part of a package of books that in one way or another relates to "community" (and thus partly or fully to sociology). Although not at the center of my research interests any longer, community was after all the topic of my ph.d. thesis ("Code begets community"). I read the three books below approximately between January 10 and February 20.

I've wanted to read Theodore Roszak's "The cult of information" (1986) for a long time, but that hasn't happened. My interest in Roszak did not decrease when I heard that he traveled around during the 90's giving techo-critical talks that ended with him smashing a computer to pieces with a sledgehammer. Besides techno-criticism, I have several other long-time interests including the connections between the 60's and 70's counterculture and the 60's and 70's emerging computer/hacker culture (in my opinion best captured in Stone's (1995) book "The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age"). I thus chose to read Roszak's "breakthrough" book, "The making of a counter culture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition" (1969). Unfortunately I cannot recommend it. It was written during, rather than after the fact, and thus documents the 60's counterculture movement and values from within, while it was happening. I guess that is illuminating to some extent, but it also makes the book caught up in things that were important right there and then, but that isn't really any longer. On the whole, the book thus felt dated. The chapters are written as independent essays and although I found some interesting, most weren't particularly interesting to me (who is Paul Goodman? I have never hear of him before. Why would I particularly care about his "visionary sociology" (all but forgotten now) and want to read a 25 pages long chapter about it?). Roszak is on the other hand credited for coining the term "counterculture"!

"Postville: A clash of cultures in heartland America" (2000) by Stephen Bloom is a very different kind of book, an eye-wittness account of how two strong, incompatible cultures ("communities") collides at a certain time and place (Iowa in the 90's, see the picture on the book cover above). Bloom, a journalist-cum-journalist professor, writes engagingly about a matter that is close to his heart and based on his personal experiences. It is a joy to read the book from a stylistic point of view. Although I've never been to Iowa, and although I've never know any ultra-orthodox Hasidic Lubavitcher jews, I can still see the scenes with my inner eye and emphatically understand the (incompatible) values expressed by the two cohesive "camps", as well as laugh out loud at Bloom's witticisms and his sharp pen.

"Here was a kind of experiment in the limits of diversity and community, the nature of community, the meaning of prejudice, even what it means to be an American. Postville seemed like a social laboratory, perhaps a metaphor for America."

Since Postville isn't an academic book, Bloom does (unfortunately) not interpret or theorize the events he describes to any deeper extent, but that also makes for an easy read and I can very much recommend the book to anyone who is interested in these topics (community, diversity, (in)tolerance, America, Hasidic jews, rural folks etc.).

Historians Henrik Berggren and Lars Trädgård have written a book about "the Swedish character"; "Är svensken människa: Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverige" (2006) [Is the Swede a human being?: Community and independence in modern Sweden]. I thought they have done a very good job of describing "what Swedes are like" and why we are the way we are - although the book is uneven, with some parts being much more interesting than others.

I very much liked the discussions about the relationships between the state, the family and the individual in Sweden and with comparisons to Germany and the United States. Swedes have, for historical and other reasons, entered into an "alliance" between the individual and the state "against", or at least at the detriment of, the family. Germans have instead chosen to form an alliance between the family and the state to the detriment of the individual, while Americans have chosen to form an alliance between the individual and the family to the detriment of the state. Both Sweden and Germany have built up welfare societies, but the Swedish welfare systems are geared towards the individual citizen, where the German systems to a higher extent is geared towards families. Husbands and wives are for example taxed as individuals in Sweden while they are taxed based on the family income in Germany.

The implications are widespread and are the result of historical and other developments and sometimes (for example in the case of marriage patterns), based on prehistories dating back to the 15th century if not longer. One part of the book treats Swedes view of love (and marriage, family life and the upbringing of children) and my wife, not being from Sweden originally, very much appreciated this part of the book and felt that it explained and answered many questions she had had about Swedes for 10 years and more. Swedes bring up their children to be independent and form their own opinions early, and this is (based on me and her comparing our experiences) apparent already in the socialization of our children in kindergarden. My wife in short felt that the book explained many things she herself had wondered about for years and years, and I guess that is as good a judgement as anything I could write here.
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Articles I've read lately (Jan)

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As I wrote recently, I've been pretty good at keeping my new year's promise of reading academic articles. My goal is to pick 200 pages of mixed academic texts every month and read them all. More specifically, I pick and put the articles in four folders and the goal is to read a folder (= 50 pages) every week. Despite not managing to read all four folders every months - sometimes rather landing at finishing off "only" three folder (=150 pages) - I'm pretty happy with the outcome this far. I haven't been equally good at writing monthly summaries of articles I've read "lately" though. I hope I can catch up before the summer.

Instead of listing the articles alphabetically, I list them folder-wise and say a few words about each (oftentimes topical) folder. During January, I "only" managed to read three folders and the fourth folder was instead pushed/postponed until February. Below are the articles I read in January.

ICT and sustainability from a (mostly) human-computer interaction perspective

Comment: There has been a lot of work on sustainability in the HCI community during the last five years. I only found out about it "recently" (a year ago) and I'm reading up on the topic.

- Laurel, B. (2011). Gaian IxD. interactions, 18(5), 38–46. */ Laurel is obviously an old hippie (the article prominently features pictures of her hugging trees) and the melding of sustainability and "Gaian awareness" goes a little bit too far for me to fully appreciate. "Gaian IxD [interaction design] may enhance Gaian awareness - awareness of our belongingness to the complex dynamic system we call Earth". /*

- Liu, T., Ding, X., Lu, T., & Gu, N (submitted). "From awareness to management practice: An electricity feedback system in a university dormitory in China". Submitted to the CHI conference but rejected (acceptance rate = 20%). Resubmitted elsewhere - I might update this reference later. */ "HCI's approach towards eco-feedback has largely focused on system design rather than studying adoption and effects in the field. [...] We draw upon our involvement in a long-term project to develop and deploy and energy-monitoring platform at a university campus in Shanghai." /*   **// A reworked version of the paper added another co-author and was accepted to the UbiComp'13 conference. The paper is now called "The collective infrastructural work of electricity: Exploring feedback in a prepaid university dorm in China". //**

- Mankoff, J. C., Blevis, E., Borning, A., Friedman, B., Fussell, S. R., Hasbrouck, J., Woodruff, A., et al. (2007). Environmental sustainability and interaction. CHI’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2121–2124). ACM. */ Three-page prep that sets the scene for a Special Interest Group meeting at the huge CHI conference. "sustainability can and should be a central focus of the field of human computer interaction". /*

- Tomlinson, B., Patterson, D. J., Pan, Y., Blevis, E., Nardi, B., Norton, J., & LaViola Jr, J. J. (2012). What if sustainability doesn’t work out? interactions, 19(6), 50–55. */ The same reasoning that was behind the very much recommended "Collapse informatics" paper but now rebranded ("adaptation informatics") and repackaged to a new, larger audience. "Adaptation informatics entail the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems for use in a future characterized by global change". /*

- Woodruff, A., Hasbrouck, J., & Augustin, S. (2008). A bright green perspective on sustainable choices. Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 313–322). ACM. */ "We present a qualitative study of 35 United States households whose occupants have made significant accommodations to their homes and behaviors in order to be more environmentally responsible". They are interested in motivations, practice, experiences and the use (or non-use) of technology in informants' efforts. /*

- Zapico, J. L., Turpeinen, M., & Brandt, N. (2009). Climate persuasive services: changing behavior towards low-carbon lifestyles. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (p. 14). ACM. */ I re-read this paper as part of preparing to be the discussant/opponent at Jorge Zapico's draft ph.d. thesis. Climate persuasive services are "ICT applications that change personal attitudes regarding climate change and/or change behavior towards reducing greenhouse gases emissions."/*

ICT and sustainability from a (mostly) ICT for sustainability perspective.

I read these articles partly to get a better feeling for what my colleagues at CESC might read, i.e. non-HCI perspectives on ICT and sustainability 

- Dobernig, K., Røpke, I., Grubbe, M., & Blum, M. (2009). Green ICT for Growth and Sustainability. Background paper, 1st Multinational knowledge brokerage event, Vienna University of Economics and Business, 30 May - 1 June 2012. */ This was a "background report" for a great workshop I attended a year ago and it only took me half a year to read it... "The main objectives are to help improve the management of potential political, social and economic contradictions of sustainable consumption with economic growth, bridge the gap between science and policy, and foster mutual understanding between the "pro-growth community" and the "beyond-growth community". /*

- Ellis, M., & Jollands, N. (2009). Gadgets and Gigawatts: Policies for Energy Efficient Electronics. OECD/IEA. */ A 400 pages long IEA (International Energy Agency†) report about consumer electronics from an energy usage/energy savings perspective. I read only the foreword and the executive summary. The implicit view purported in the report is very top-down; 1) collect information, 2) make decision and 3) convince consumers". As electronic devices have become more affordable, numbers have increased dramataically and "electronic devices have made a major contribution to the recent growth in total residential electricity use and will become one of the largest end-use categories in years to come." /*

- Malmodin, J., Moberg, Å., Lundén, D., Finnveden, G., & Lövehagen, N. (2010). Greenhouse gas emissions and operational electricity use in the ICT and entertainment & media sectors. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 14(5), 770–790. */ An LCA study of the global footprint of the ICT and media sectors - written by CESC colleagues of mine. Still, while the final figure (The Footprint) is both interesting and important, LCA studies are far from exiting to read. Lots of text about methodology and of (partly arbitrary) delimitations and decision taken and lots of tables (e.g. "Operational electricity (TWh) and total CO2-eq emissions (Mt) relating to ICT and its subsectors in 2007")  /*

- Seetharam, A., Somasundaram, M., Towsley, D., Kurose, J., & Shenoy, P. (2010). Shipping to streaming: is this shift green? Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Green networking (pp. 61–68). ACM. */ "we investigate the environmental- and energy-related impacts of [shipping vs streaming] of movie content delivery." Streaming a movie consumes 80% of the energy needed to ship a DVD disc, "but has a carbon footprint that is approximately 100% higher". These figures can be reduced significantly, but movies can easily balloon in size (Blu-Ray & 3D = "we can imagine future movie sizes of 150 GB"). Moreover, "Some customers might want to watch movies multiple times" - incurring no additional environmental costs in the shipping scenario but multiplying the costs in the streaming scenario. /*

- Williams, E. (2001). Environmental effects of information and communication technologies. Nature, 479 (Nov 17, 2011), 354-358. */ Short but extremely compact text summing up the environmental effects of ICT on different levels; 1)physical level, 2) ICT applications, 3) economic growth and consumption patterns and 4) industry, technology convergence and society. "Society's response to the energy used by ICTs has focused mainly on improving the efficiency of the operational phase of devices" /*

ICT and sustainability in relation to teaching and to ICT for development (ICT4D)

Comment: a few papers I read to understand the relationship between ICT4S and ICT4D and some paper "summing things up".

- Ali, M., & Bailur, S. (2007). The challenge of “sustainability” in ICT4D–Is Bricolage the answer?. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, São Paulo, Brazil (May 2007). */ "We argue that sustainability is an unrealistic concept, which is difficult to operationalize". Although defining sustainability is a drag, the authors quickly set out to argue that sustainability is "contradictory to the life cycle itself, where nothing can be perpetual". After having set up this straw man, the authors slaughter it and argue that "bricolage" is the way to go. I found the thinking in this paper confused and didn't agree with the authors. /*

- Brewer, E., Demmer, M., Du, B., Ho, M., Kam, M., Nedevschi, S., Pal, J., et al. (2005). The case for technology in developing regions. Computer, 38(6), 25–38. */ Overview of the area ICT for development (ICT4D). "Alongside good governance, technology is considered among the greatest enablers for improved quality of life. However, the majority of its benefits have been concentrated in industrialized nations and therefor limited to a fraction of the world's population. [...] there has been little work on how technology needs in developing regions differ from those of industrialized nations." Great article. /*

- Jabareen, Y. (2011). Teaching sustainability: A multidisciplinary approach. Creative Education, 2(4), 388–392. */ "this paper suggest a new conceptual framework for teaching sustainability that assumes the multidisciplinary nature of sustainability". I don't know where I got this article from, but I have a really bad feeling about the open-access journal where it was published. Creative Education has an "Article Processing Charge" of 800 USD for a paper of 10 pages ("You can make payment via Bank Transfer, Paypal or Western Union"). Authors in 3rd world countries ("group one countries") are not charged a fee and authors in 2nd world countries ("group two countries") are granted 50% discount. /*

- Mann, S., Smith, L., & McGregor, G. (2011). A research framework for sustainable software. Presented at the 2nd annual conference of Computing and Information Technology Research and Education New Zealand (CITRENZ 2011). */ "This paper proposes a conceptual Sustainability Lens as an underlying metaphor for a research agenda in development of a sustainable approach to software development. [...] Imagine you had a pair of glasses that [...] looked at the world through a "sustainable lens". What would you see?" Implicit message: unsustainability is just an issue of not having enough information. /*

- Mann, S., Muller, L., Davis, J., Roda, C., & Young, A. (2010). Computing and sustainability: evaluating resources for educators. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 41(4), 144–155. */ "This paper aims to address a barrier to the integration of sustainability into computing teaching - that of a perceived paucity of resources. [...] This paper describes the development of a "framework" Computing Education for Sustainability (CE4S)". This is stringent study of how to analyze (ICT4S) issues, evaluate (ICT4S) resources and match (ICT4S) needs. Good article of potential practical use for educators. /*

† There's a short blurb about The International Energy Agency in the beginning of the report. IEA was established in 1974 (i.e. directly after the 1973 oil crisis) and first among its seven "basic aims" are "To maintain and improve systems for coping with oil supply disruptions". I predict they will have a tougher time living up to that aim during the next decade than they've had during the previous four decades since their founding.

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"My" bachelor's theses this spring

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Same as last year, I have been the advisor of a group of nine students who (for the most part) work in pairs and who have been writing their bachelor's theses during the spring term. Same as last year, I will also be the examiner and read/oppose/judge twice as many other bachelor's theses a few weeks from now.

We have, as usual, been working with group supervision (i.e. I meet all my students at the same time) and as usual, the students have been pretty involved in each others' theses. In fact, part (1/7th) of the grade they receive is based on actively helping others by providing quality comments on other students' evolving theses during the term. Beyond our face-to-face group supervision meetings, we also use a group annotation system (currently Google docs) for commenting on each other's theses. I wrote a blog post a few months ago about an academic paper I wrote together with two colleagues about this "best practices" process our ours. The paper in question, "Using group supervision and social annotation systems to support students' academic writing" was finished quite some time ago. I was accepted for publication and the final, proof-read version was handed in to an open-access journal "Högre Utbildning" [Higher education] almost three months ago. It will, I presume, be published in their next issue.

I have anyway been busy lately, reading not "my" students' finished theses, but the draft versions of their final theses. Earlier today, at our final meeting for the term, I provided feedback - as did the students - on these almost-finished theses. What remains now are only the students' final efforts at polishing and fixing up the last details before handing in their theses next week and presenting (defending) them two weeks later. 

The five thesis I've been the advisor of are all written in Swedish and they are:

- Heurlin & Wahlstedt, "Min kompis Kenza och jag: En studie av enkelriktade relationer på bloggar" [My friend Kenza and I: A study about one-way relationships on blogs]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Lagerberg, "Sociala rörelser och sociala nätverk: En kartläggning av den chilenska studentrörelsen" [Social movements and social networks: Mapping the Chilean student movement]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Fleetwood & Joneby, "Twitter i svenska polisens tjänst" [Twitter in the service of the Swedish Police]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

The last two will not be finished in time (will not be presented/defended in May) but will instead be defended after the summer. They don't have any titles at the moment so I went back to the thesis specifications that were written in mid-February to see what they were called at the time:

- Nilsson, "Parasociala Facebookrelationer" [Parasocial Facebook relations]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Ahlsén & Engelbert, "Miljömedvetenhet med hjälp av energisnål webdesign" [Environmental consciousness through energy-stingy web design]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

These theses will all be published on the web, later (before or after the summer). I will try to remember to update this blog post and link to the actual texts at a later point, but do remind me later if I forget! It's also possible that a title or two might be tweaked or updated, so I really should try to remember to revise this blog post later.

I think both me and the students are pretty happy about the resulting reports. The bachelor's thesis is  great practice for the students before they write an individual master's thesis that is twice as large (30 hp) two years later.

PS. KTH produced a press release in June about Fleetwood & Joneby's thesis, frames as "The reason why the police uses Twitter"

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Impressions from the CHI conference

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I've attended at the huge CHI conference this week, i.e. the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. This year it was not just huge, but huger than ever, with 3450 people attending the conference at the enormous Palais de Congrès a Paris. It was more than 10 years since I went to CHI the last time around.

The conference was four days long and had no less than 16 parallel tracks, i.e. at any point in time I can (and have to) choose one topic to listen to - in competition with 15 other topics. There were more than 15 persons from my department (MID) at the conference, but if we compare notes there is a high chance that we have attended totally different conferences, i.e. that our respective interests have not overlapped even once...

The sheer size of the conference paradoxically makes it hard to meet people at the conference. It might be that you just happen to not run into people you know are there during a whole day (or a week). Also, there are people I'd like to meet because I have read something they have written, but since I don't know what they look like, the chances of meeting up and striking up a conversation are close to zero. It might be the case that I know someone who knows them (and who could introduce me), but how do I know who that middleman is? And what are the chances of us three being in the same place at the same time? 

Taking all of this into account, I have have a hard time understanding why anybody would want the conference to become even bigger, but it seems the organizers take for granted that the size will increase even further in the future. But there has to be a point when the conference can't grow anymore, right? When any further increases in size actually decreases the utility of attending the conference, right? Also, it's a very expensive conference to attend (as a ACM/SIGCHI non-member I paid €1050 for the conference and my one-day workshop). 

I'm struck by the fact that I actually got to know more new people at the tiny workshop I went to in Vienna a year ago (with perhaps 100 participants) than at this huge conference. Since there are so many people from my own department here (as well as other Swedes I already know), it is easy to spend a lot of time with people you already know. But really, we wouldn't really need to go to Paris to chat, so what really is the utility of going to this particular (huge) conference? I would need to think some more about that, but I think I already know the answer.

Since this is such a big and prestigious conference, the primary reason to go would be because you have submitted a paper that got accepted. In the HCI/UX area (human-computer interaction/user interface/interaction design/user experience area), getting something accepted to CHI is as good as getting a paper accepted to a scientific journal. And so my thoughts did at times drift to what I could/might submit for next year's CHI. I have several suggestions, but the two coolest ideas are:

- Many people who talk about sustainability start by saying that "people are not rational actors" (i.e. you can't convince someone to change their unsustainable behaviors and practices by just appealing to hard facts and rational arguments). Then they show a system they have built which bombards the users with bars and graphs (tailored for "rational" left-brain engineering-type users). So me an Marisa Cohn (almost-finshed ph.d. student from the University of California at Irvine but also a visiting researcher at KTH) talked about what it would mean to really accept an build upon on the fact that "people are not rational actors". We came up with lots of ideas and we need to work out if there is a paper hiding in the bouquet of diverse and exciting ideas we shot off, but what got us started was the (made-up) concept of "functional superstition". How could we seed, encourage and build (computer) systems that promotes pro-sustainable "superstitious" behaviors, i.e. encouraging people to "do the right thing" but for all the "wrong" (i.e. non-rational) reasons?

- I collected super-cool data about the DeLaval Voluntary Milking System (VMS) 10 years ago together with my friend and then-colleague Christer Garbis (now at Amazon). Then he moved to US and nothing came out of this project of ours (it was just a hobby project to start with). I still have the data (visits to farms who had installed the VMS system and interviews with the system interface designers). And I still have a number of great stories about design/user interface challenges when designing for 700 kg "milking athletes" who by no means are stupid, but who (it has to be acknowledges) have "limited cognitive abilities". This would be the foundation of a paper about "Bovine-Computer Interaction" (BCI) and, finally, the HCI field is catching up to our ground-breaking research; there were no less than two papers presented this year that literally sets the ground for our paper; "Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI): Changing perspective on HCI, participation and sustainability" and "Ethical issues and guidelines when conducting HCI studies with animals". As to reporting back from the frontiers of ACI/BCI, what is dearly needed is an update of the story I can provide, and I have come to an agreement with my colleague Henrik Artman that I will specify a master's thesis proposal, that he will be the advisor of that thesis, and that the whole purpose of that exercise would be to revisit and see how the BCI field has developed during the last decade (i.e. new interviews with farmers and with the designers that would provide an update of the data we collected a decade ago). Even if we do find a suitable (high-performing) student immediately, it will still unfortunately be impossible to submit a full paper for the next CHI conference (deadline September 18th). We would instead submit something to the alt.chi track (deadline Dec. 27): "alt.chi is a forum for controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI". That sounds exactly like our cup of tea and who wouldn't love a paper called "When do you want to get milked today?: Bovine-Computer Interaction and [something]".

I have a few other ideas for papers, but (I'm sure you will all agree) that these two are the coolest, most high-profile and fun papers I have thought about  - although unfortunately only the first relates to what the topic I really want to focus on - sustainability. As to pushing boundaries, some of the CHI work I heard being presented really does that, but other work is incremental, (probably) impeccably conducted and (surely) written-up in fine flowing flowery English, but unfortunately not very exciting (i.e. few new ideas). I often found myself asking "why?". Why do a study in the first place when the results are sooo unsurprising (something a clever researcher cold have figured out before embarking on the study), or when there are other ways of solving the same problem that are better, easier and/or more inexpensive? We all know that "to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". To the computer scientist every problem (or "problem") begs to be "solved" by a new (advanced, complex, expensive, complicated) computer system. I sometimes felt that there is so much energy exerted on so many less-than-useful computer systems that won't ever be developed and whose memory will be buried in the form of never-more-to-be-read research papers. That is slightly depressing since there really is no shortage of really important and hard challenges ahead of us (pdf, pdf).  

The strangest and most intriguing title of all the papers this year was "CHI and the future robot enslavement of humankind: A retrospective" - and it was quite a good paper all-in-all (one of the keywords was "maschinenweltherrschaftsangst". At the pre-conference workshop I attended, someone looked for sustainable-computing metaphors and quickly went from "the cloud" to "the sky" and then quickly on to "roots". I instead got stuck in the middle and thought of a title for a paper that is great for all the obvious reasons (as long as you "get" the reference to the Terminator); "After The Cloud - Skynet". Perhaps I'll pass that title on to the robot enslavement guys as a suggestion for a follow-up paper... :-) 

Another realization was that I ought to downgrade paper sessions (since I can read the papers afterwards), and instead upgrade stuff happening right here right now, like panels and meetings with special interest groups. I thus spontaneously signed up for a half-day course on "The past 100 years of the future: CHI/HCI/UX in Sci-Fi movies and television". That course was given by Aaron Marcus, who beyond being a senior CHI person and and very obviously is a huge SF fan. He was perhaps a little too much of a fan, spending a little too much time with his personal favorites and stuff from his own childhood (50's, 60's) rather than with more modern stuff (80's and on) that a higher proportion of the course participants were more familiar with. It was still a fun course although (for both good and bad) the course at times came to more resemble a conversation or a seminar (discussions instead of "expert lectures"). What did I get out of that course? A sensitivity to computing themes and visualizations of future technology in general and computing/HCI technologies in particular in fiction - as well a list of movies that I'd like to (re-)watch.

Something genuinely new to me that I picked up at the conference was the term "design fiction". Although I had heard the term before (like two weeks ago for the first time), I wasn't familiar with the ideas of concretely (though movies and perhaps mock-ups) visualizing scenarios of the future. The funny thing is that me and my students have created design fictions for 10 years in my course "Future of Media" - I just didn't know about the fancy term and I will definitely read up on the concept and hopefully get some new ideas that can be incorporated in the course (the autumn 2013 course theme will be "The future of news / News of the future". The results of the last two years ("The Future of magazines" and "The Future of radio") - including design fiction-esque movies and texts - can be found in our online Future of Media archive. The course was given in Swedish before that and earlier results are thus less accessible to an international audience. 

As to the rest of the conference, I attended 1) most of everything tagged with "sustainability" (like paper session on "sustainable energy" and "sustainability"), 2) most of everything tagged with HCI4D, i.e. HCI for development - CHI for developing countries as well as for marginalized groups in developed countries (like paper sessions on "developing the world" and "design for development") and 3) paper sessions about social media. That was a succinct one-sentence long summary of my CHI conference activities! 

Now that I'm home (and in line with my methodical reading habits), I have already spent some time with the proceedings (delivered on a 16 GB USB memory stick) and with the goal of choosing 150 pages of CHI 2013 articles that I will read before the summer. Adding the position papers for the pre-conference workshop I attended (another 50 pages), those 200 pages are equivalent to four weeks of reading articles, since my goal is to read 50 pages of academic articles per week. That is what I have decided to spare for CHI, and it will in fact be tough to make that selection of "only" 150 pages as this "only" correspond to something around 17(?) articles (so many articles, so little time to read!). The articles I have chosen will eventually turn up in my ongoing "articles I've read" series of blog posts (published in parallel to my "books I've read" series of blog posts).

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