Meeting place master's theses (seminar)

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We had the best event but the worst timing ever!

I supervised five master's students who wrote their theses in the intersection of ICT and sustainability this past spring. Three out of five had a research project as their principal. That means the task they worked on for half a year originated in a KTH research project and that they got additional help (to varying degrees) not just from me as an advisor but also from the people who worked in the research project in question. Several students were delayed (one started late) and most presented their theses after rather then before the summer. My previous two blog posts are about the outcomes of two of these theses, e.g. two proposed paper that we have now submitted to the conference "Energy for Society" (paper #1, paper #2). It could very well be the case that at least one and perhaps in fact two additional paper might come out of the remaining three theses!

Most of our students write their master's (as well as their bachelor's) theses during the spring term and they start looking for topics around this time of the year (or earlier). Many students prefer to write their thesis with a company as the principal since they want work experience and perhaps also a crack at a good job in an interesting company.

So this year we decided to up the game and do our best to find master's thesis proposals (in the intersection between ICT, digitalization and sustainability) at companies. Our solution was to invite companies with interests in this area to an After Work event (on Nov 9). I think the idea is ingenious and there are quite a few reasons also for companies to have engineering students do their thesis work with/for them. But many companies don't know exactly what a master's thesis entails, how to put together an attractive offer, at what time of the year to do it as well as various other practical issues.

So we had the great idea to organize an After Work event for companies to tell them some about what our students can do for them and how they should go about to formulate master's thesis proposals that would be interesting and attractive to our students. And that was just the first hour of the After Work, during the second hour we would circulated among the participants and then-and-there helped them formulate great master's theses proposals. And we did it! I think the program for the After Work was brilliant and that we delivered on the promise. There were only two problems with the execution of the event. The first problem was that we had only a limited number of persons/companies signing up, but I didn't think that wasn't a problem - if ten or a dozen persons/companies show up and we manage to convert each into a thesis topic/proposal and we manage to find/recruit students to write their theses at these companies, well, then we would have a really great case both for our students and for other companies come next year.

The second problem was however that several decimeters, perhaps upwards to half a meter of snow fell in the 12 hours preceding the event ("Snowpocalypse" - see great pictures here). Public and private transportation (buses, trams, trains, cars and to some extent even the subway) was crippled, if not paralyzed on this particular day! Many people were snowed-in and could not get to work or home or move in-between different parts of Stockholm. Only half of the people who had declared they would come actually showed up. People from KTH (me, Elina, Hanna, Mattias, Miriam, Tina, Mario, Robin) (barely) outnumbered out external corporate guests.

So, the idea was great but I have concluded that the best way to frame the event this time around is to regard it as a test round. We should analyze what went wrong (and what we could have done better) - beyond the weather - and plan for a better, bigger, bolder, beautiful event next year. Also, it should be organized not in the beginning of November but two or three weeks earlier (mid-October) to get the timing right!

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Using low-fi user-centered design methods to overcome barrier to adopting photovoltaics (paper)

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I recently wrote a blog post about a paper (abstract) that I submitted to the conference "Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research and Social Science". Well, I submitted another abstract to the conference, "Using low-fi user-centered design methods to overcome barrier to adopting photovoltaics", and it was written by Robin Chanapai and me.

Here's the background: I was Robin's advisor when he wrote his master's thesis this past spring. Robin's thesis was presented only a month ago and it's called "Tearing down barriers of photovoltaics with usability design: Winter is coming" (see the thesis abstract below). Robin wrote his thesis within the research project called "Holistic business models and ICT solutions for prosumers" and it involved researchers from Uppsala University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology as well as energy companies and the service design company Transformator.

Something really cool is that it seems the project would pay for Robin's costs for attending the conference should the proposed paper be accepted! Here's the paper abstract

Using low-fi user-centered design methods to overcome barriers to adopting photovoltaics in Sweden

Keywords: photovoltaics, prosumers, user-centered design, interface design

Abstract: Renewable energy sources are important for shifting our energy system in a more sustainable direction. While renewables (mainly hydro) provide upwards to 50% of Sweden’s electricity demand, this could be further improved if private citizens to a higher extent covered their roofs with solar cells and became micro producers of electricity.

                        

While the conditions for successfully harvesting solar energy through solar cells/Photovoltaics (PV) exist in Sweden, the technology has not yet met with much success. A recent study (Eriksson & Enlund 2016) enumerates barriers that discourage or prevent homeowners from investing in PV. Some are difficult to circumvent like the cost of investments or rules and regulations that currently do not encourage such investments. Other problems however seem to stem from sceptical attitudes that are based on a lack of understanding of how PV works and/or of the viability of PV when taking Swedish conditions into account.

                        

While we can strive to overcome such mental barriers through informing or educating homeowners, this alone will not change their behaviors (Owens & Driffill, 2008). In this paper we instead 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. These methods are widely used in Human-Computer Interaction and adopting these methods in energy research could help bridge the gap between (homeowners’) attitudes and behaviors. We believe that a wider deployment of an information package that is based on our results could in fact lead to an increased interest in installing PV in Sweden.

                        

Beyond reporting on the results of a study, this paper also provides a framework that can be used to achieve similar results in other countries, thereby contributing to a more sustainable future.

---------- Robin's thesis abstract ---------- 

Abstract
Photovoltaics has so far not seen a huge success in Sweden. Recent studies have shown that some of the reasons could be an experienced lack of understanding of the technology, and a feeling that the lack of energy production during winter when a house’s energy consumption is the highest makes photovoltaics uninteresting. The ongoing research project Holistic business models and ICT solutions for prosumers seeks to increase the use of photovoltaics in Sweden, and have created business model concepts in an attempt to break perceived barriers of photovoltaics. My task in this project was to design a tailor made ICT solution with the users’ needs in focus.

A series of interviews were conducted with households interested in photovoltaics to investigate what information is relevant to understand the business model, and create a starting point for the design process. To ensure a high level of usability of the ICT solution, an iterative design process was conducted with user tests between iterations.

This resulted in a low fidelity prototype of a smartphone application, consisting of greyscale mockups. The prototype has as much as possible taken the interviewed households’ wishes into account, while adhering to design principles set for usability design. The interviews and user tests also gave some new insights into the informants’ attitudes towards the business model suggested by the research project, which is discussed at the end of the report. 

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ICT support for collective energy management in housing cooperatives (paper)

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We submitted an abstract to "Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research and Social Science" at the end of last week. The proposed paper is called "ICT support for collective energy management in housing cooperatives" and it's written by Hanna Hasselqvist (first author), me, Cristian Bogdan and Isaac Rondon.

Here's the background: I was Isaac's advisor when he wrote his master's thesis during the past spring. Isaac thesis was presented only a month ago and it's called "Eco-visualization for amateur energy work: Supporting energy management in Housing Cooperatives" (see the thesis abstract below). Isaac wrote his thesis within a large pan-European research project about design of more sustainable and energy oriented smart cities, CIVIS. The principal of his thesis (Swedish: "uppdragsgivare") was this research project and more specifically my colleague and next door neighbor Hanna Hasselqvist. Her fellow CIVIS researcher (and ph.d. thesis advisor) Cristi is also a co-author of this paper.

Hanna and me did most of the work on putting together an outline for the paper and then, based on that outline, generating the abstract below, but it also partly draws on Isaac's thesis and we expect the two co-authors to pull some weight when the actual process of writing the paper starts. If the abstract/proposed paper is accepted for presentation at the conference (which goes without mentioning).

ICT support for collective energy management in housing cooperatives

Authors: Hanna Hasselqvist, Daniel Pargman, Cristian Bogdan, Isaac. Rondon

Track: #2 - Energy Consumption and Behaviour

Keywords: Information and communication technologies, Eco­feedback, Amateur energy mangement, Housing cooperatives

Abstract: Energy feedback technologies for reducing or shifting domestic energy consumption are a central concern in research on energy use and energy behaviours. Such technologies are almost exclusively targeted at individual users or at households (DiSalvo et.al. 2010, Dourish 2010, Brynjarsdottir 2012). There are however domestic energy contexts where various factors limit what individuals or households can do in order to influence their energy use (Dillahunt et. al. 2010, Mose Entwistle et. al. 2015).

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 (from only a few up to hundreds of households). Since the members generally lack deep expertise about energy, it is often challenging for cooperatives to manage their building(s) and to make energy­related decisions (Hauge et. al. 2014). Housing cooperatives annually elect a board among its members and in our work we have seen that it is common for the boards to appoint someone to be in charge of energy issues. We refer to this role as “amateur energy manager”.

To support the work of amateur energy managers, we have developed a software platform for exploring the own cooperative’s energy use in relation to that of other cooperatives and for knowledge exchange between cooperatives. The end goal is to directly support amateur energy managers (or the board) in making decisions that reduce the energy use of their housing cooperative, or that increase their production of renewable energy.

We here present and discuss the design of the software platform, in relation to the challenges of amateur energy management and collective energy decisionmaking, together with the results from nine interviews with amateur energy managers who have tried the tool.

---------- Isaac's thesis abstract ---------- 

Eco-visualization for energy amateur work – Supporting energy management in housing cooperatives 

Eco-visualization technologies aim to trigger more environmental behaviors by providing feedback about the usage of key resources such as energy. However, the design of these technologies to encourage energy conservation has been mainly focused on individual behaviors in a household level. Addressing a different approach researchers at KTH have designed the housing cooperative app, a web application that provides feedback about the collective energy consumption of housing cooperatives in Stockholm, aiming to reduce the cooperative's collective energy use.

By using a Research Through Design approach, this thesis explores how data visualization can support amateur energy work through the housing cooperative app. For this, I identified design problems in the data visualization elements of the app, which I aimed to solve by redesigning them; then, I conducted semi structured interviews with amateur energy workers, where they interacted with the application, to generate new insights about how data visualization can be used in an amateur work context.

Through the interviews it was possible to obtain qualitative answers about the challenges of amateurs energy workers and the way data visualization could be used to address theses challenges and achieve their goals in an efficient way. The interviews was divided in Background, Amateur work, Comprehension and Usefulness of the data, and were supported by a walkthrough in the application presenting to users different scenarios and features in the application.

Results showed the potential that data visualizations have to support amateur energy workers to overcome their main challenges and to identify the rewards of their work. In this thesis I discuss about this potential, and about design aspects that are important to consider when designing eco-visualization technologies in amateur energy context..

World Science Fiction Convention submission (paper)

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Having read huge amounts of Science Fiction literature when I was younger, I am always a little jealous of people who have chosen SF as their academic field. Oh, the joy when I will now finally get the chance to write a paper together of one of those persons who can attend an SF convention and (with good conscience) say that he is actually "working" (although I have done it once myself).

So I have submitted a 500-word abstract together with the literature scholar Jerry Määttä (Uppsala University) that combines our interests and that fits the theme of the academic track at the upcoming 75th World Science Fiction Convention (Wikipedia) to be held in Helsinki in August next year. The theme of the academic track is “100 Years of Estrangement”. From the call:

"Estrangement, or defamiliarization (ostranenie), has long been a crucial concept in our understanding of speculative fiction. Since its first appearance in Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Technique” (or “Art as Device”) in 1917, estrangement has made its way into the theories of prose fiction, of theatre, and of film, and it forms the core of some of the foundational works in the theory of science fiction"

Proposals about various topics related to the concept "estrangement" are encouraged, including but not limited to:

• What is the dynamic between defamiliarization, mental transportation and identification? How do estranging and fantastical effects impact the reader’s perception of the storyworld or sympathy towards the characters?
• How do works of speculative fiction balance estranging or defamiliarizing techniques and the naturalizing effects inherent to its worldbuilding and characterization? How does defamiliarization relate to the realistic illusions created by speculative fiction?
• How is defamiliarization used in fantastic genres to question or critique societal issues and/or social identity categories (e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, social class)?

Our submissions is all about estrangement/defamiliarization and it's partly about Science Fiction too, but it's also partly about (engineering) education. It is in fact the first out of several papers I plan to write about ways of visualizing the extravagant use of resources (primarily energy) that we nowadays assume is "normal", but from a historical point of view in no way is.

I'm not sure I will attend the world SF conference but my co-author Jerry will. He has in fact already bought his ticket and he will also be the presenter of our paper there should it be accepted.

Estranging Energy:

Teaching Abstract Concepts through Making Strange

Jerry Mättä, Department of Literature, Uppsala University and Daniel Pargman, Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Few people intuitively grasp the energy needs of our everyday technology (smartphones, computers, cars), or indeed our bodies (the daily caloric intake), and it is often equally hard to understand the concomitant but invisible carbon emissions that are the result of our modern, high-energy technological lifestyle.

The aim of this paper is to examine and discuss one possible way of alleviating these difficulties, namely through the use of images, metaphors, and estrangement, enabling especially students to defamiliarise abstract concepts such as energy by forcing them to conceive these terms as concrete, tangible, and manipulable. Apart from discussing estrangement as a concept and some of the numerous interpretations and developments of Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie (not least Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung and Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement), this paper analyses a few examples where science fictional estrangement can be used in teaching abstract concepts – in this case pertaining to energy and sustainability.

For instance, one way of defamiliarising students to the abstract concept of energy is through the term or unit ‘energy slave’, standing for the potential energy output of one well-fed and fully functional human being: 75 watts during an 8-hour day, for a total of 600 Wh (0.6 kWh) per day (Nikiforuk 2014; Avallone et al. 2007). The ‘energy slave’ unit is thus comparable to the ‘horsepower’ unit – where one horsepower corresponds to about 10 energy slaves – but also to fossil fuels, where a barrel of oil (159 litres) is “roughly equivalent to 25 000 hours of human labour” (McKibben 2011).

While the invocation of the term ‘energy slave’ might be perceived as inappropriate in some contexts (e.g. in a society that still grapples with the consequences of actual historical slavery), we use it here due to the saying that, according to the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”. The term ‘energy slave’ brings a tangible, skin-in-the-game aspect to the act of imagining or estranging energy, and through mental exercises such as this, it becomes much easier to both make sense of and get a feeling for various calculations about everyday energy consumption as well as our dependency on fossil fuels.

Apart from the fact that thought experiments on sustainability often read much like science fiction in themselves (going back at least as far as the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”; see Höhler 2015), this paper examines how concepts that are often used within literary scholarship, and particularly within science fiction studies, can shed light on pedagogical challenges and didactic practices within the field of teaching energy and sustainability. Besides the concept of ‘energy slaves’, this paper also explores the didactic employment of images, metaphors, and estrangement from works ranging from Jonathan Swift’s proto sf Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009).

References:

Avallone, E.A., T. Baumeister III, T. & Sadegh, A.M. (2007). Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, 11th Edition. Mc-Graw Hill

Höhler, S. (2015). Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990. Pickering & Chatto

McKibben, B. (2011). Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Random House LLC

Nikiforuk, A. (2014). The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude. Greystone Books Ltd.

Shklovsky, V. (1917). “Art as Technique”, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. Lee T. Lemon & Marion J. Reiss. U of Nebraska P (1965), pp. 3-24

Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press

Bios:

Jerry Määttä is an Associate Professor at the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has published on science fiction, sociology of literature, the Swedish book market, popular fiction, audio books, literary prizes and awards, and has recently finished a project on British and American apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives in film and literature since ca. 1950.

Daniel Pargman is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is interested in energy research and social science, teaching sustainability and computing within limits. He blogs at danielpargman.blogspot.com.

Blog Week/Blog Mania

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I have a huge backlog of things to write about so I declare the upcoming week (starting today) my second Blog Week ever. The first blog week happened about the same time (October/November) three years ago. What "Blog Week" means is that I will post a new blog post every day for one whole week.

However, I have handed in no less than eight submissions that I have not yet had the opportunity to write about on the blog AND a lot of exciting bloggable events will happen during the upcoming week, so I have decided that I will basically blog at a "heavily accelerated pace" - writing a new blog post every or every second day - until I have caught up. So this might formally not be the beginning of "Blog Week" as much as it will be "Blog Mania" for the next two weeks or so...

The main reason for this massive backlog is the fact that I handed in no less than six submissions (e.g. 300-word abstracts of planned papers) to the upcoming conference "Energy for Society: 1st International Conference on Energy Research and Social Science". I think it's an exciting conference and I really want to go to it since it is held just outside Barcelona where I plan to spend quite some time in 2018. Attending that conference in April would also be the perfect opportunity to reknit my contacts with the two universities I have visited in Barcelona; UAB and UPC.
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Visiting UAB and UPC (in Barcelona)

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I guess I'll just blurt it out: I have stated to plan another sabbatical and I will go to Barcelona with my family for six months sometime during the next academic year (2017/2018). This could theoretically happen already during the autumn of 2017 but the first half of 2018 (January - June) seems more likely.

Here's how I can take a sabbatical so soon after our previous sabbatical (in 2014): This academic year (2016/2017) I have taken on (or alternatively, 'been burdened with') tasks at work - such as giving courses and participating in research projects - that together adds up to 110% of a "normal" workload. That means I will be able to add another 10% of a man-year to the overtime I have already accumulated and I will by next summer have saved up overtime corresponding to about 45% of a man-year. That means I can basically take half a year off while my employer continues to pay my salary and I really can't think of a better way to 'reduce' or 'withdraw' my overtime than by going on another sabbatical.

We did go to UC Irvine for six months on a sabbatical during the first half of 2014, but I did not at that time have a significant amount of saved-up overtime so I for the most part spent those six months 'working-but-at-a-distance'. This time around I would have a lot more freedom to do what I'd like to do. I guess I could hang at bars or at the beach if I wanted to, but that's not going to happen. I have in fact already now, more than a year in advance, started to think about what kinds of academic projects I will engage in for the duration of my sabbatical. Setting aside plenty of time for reading, for getting to know new people, for attending seminars and other academic activities and for learning a lot of new things is of course a given. I will also prioritize spending time with my family, exploring a new city (Barcelona), a new region (Catalonia) a new country (Spain) as well as perhaps neighboring countries (Andorra, France, Italy?). Perhaps it's also time for me to write a book? I already have three quite different book projects in mind and any of them could be interesting to work on during a sabbatical. Another possible (smaller) project would be to give a ph.d. course at [optional] university that would use the ph.d. course we are currently teaching as a template.

A good start for planning a sabbatical is to think about relevant criteria and then figure out where to go. After Irvine in California, we are now aiming for Barcelona. Why Barcelona? There are plenty of reasons. The most important are that it's a really nice, dynamic city and we also want our children to improve their Spanish fluency. But there are many other nice cities in Spain with universities and something really important to me is the fact that there are interesting research groups and interesting research opportunities in Barcelona that might not exist in many other places. Since my wife has an agenda of her own, I will now write exclusively based on my personal perspective. We have just spent the major part of the past week (autumn break in our kids' schools) being tourists and getting a better feel for Barcelona and I also took the opportunity to visit the two research groups that I'm most interested in collaborating with. I also gave two different talks at these research groups (see further below), "Computing within Limits and the Sharing Economy/Collaborative Consumption" and "On the effects of the early 1970s global peak in oil production".


I have for a long time had broad research interests and with many threads stretching out in various directions "beyond" computing (which is evidently clear for anyone who follows the books I have read backwards in time). I have also recently (this autumn) started to branch out and I am right now writing my first papers ever that do not have anything at all to do with computing (the first paper is instead about energy and society). It has become increasingly clear to me that the academic fields that I want to explore on my sabbatical primarily have to do with more radical thoughts about ecology and the moden project, i.e. degrowth, ecological economics, political ecology, World-Systems theory, resource issues (peak oil), energy analysis/social metabolism, contrafactual history, the sharing economy/collaborative consumption, basic income, voluntary simplicity, self-sufficiency, the precariat, intentional communities, activist and grassroots movements, computing (access and use) among the non-wealthy, minimal computing, appropriate/intermediate technologies, conviviality as well as other thoughts of thinkers such as Andre Gorz and Ivan Illich. And so on. So that's why I have chosen to go to The Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and more specifically to The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientales, ICTA). ICTA is a hothouse for the kinds of thinking I want to learn more about. While they do work in the intersection of sustainability and technology, there is no one else there working in the intersection of these topics and computing and I find that oddly exciting. That's an environment where I would have to exert myself to understand the interest and the research results of others. Here's how ICTA presents itself in three short sentences:

"The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) is a multidisciplinary centre that promotes academic research and postgraduate education in the environmental sciences. It aims to improve our understanding of global environmental change, and the nature and causes of environmental problems. In addition, it studies policies, strategies and technologies to foster a transition to a sustainable economy."

Note to self: look through their website and read up on research that seems interesting before I go or immediately after I arrive!


If it turns out to be lonely being the only "computer person" at ICTA, I also plan to in some way also be affiliated with the technical university in Barcelona, BarcelonaTech (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC). There are people there doing exciting work on the commons, the Sharing Economy/Collaborative Consumption and ICTD, although you wouldn't know it if you only looked at their webpages and their institutional affiliation. David Franquesa and Leandro Navarro both belong to the "Distributed Systems Group (DSG Lab)" which belong to the larger "Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (CNDS) Research Group" which in its turn is part of The Department of Computer Architecture (DAC) at that university...

I met David Franquesa at the beginning of the summer at Computing within Limits 2016 where he presented his paper "A Circular Commons for Digital Devices" (pdf). The paper was co-authored by Leandro Navarro and both of them had apparently attended the ICT4S conference in Copenhagen last year where their paper "Breaking Barriers on Reuse of Digital Devices Ensuring Final Recycling" (pdf) won the Best Paper award. I was in Copenhagen too but did not talk to them there but my wife apparently met them. David was also part of organizing the OuiShare fest in Barcelona last week and it's a pity we missed it by just a few days! Their group also have many contacts and links to sharing economy/collaborative consumption research groups and activists like gufi.net (a Telecommunications Networks as a Commons), Barcola (Collaborative Economy and Commons Based Peer Production in Barcelona), Electronic reuse (ereuse, Open Source Technology for reusing Digital Devices ensuring final recycling), The Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3 at the Open University of Catalonia) including the Digital Commons Research Group (DIMMONS), the people who organized or talked at the Barcelona OuiShare fest and the UPC Institute of Sustainability (IS.UPC). Have I missed something? Probably, but that's enough to get started...


During our trip to Barcelona, we for the most part dutifully played the role of tourists and enjoyed what Barcelona had to offer us to the fullest. I have never been to Barcelona before and as a tourist I'd especially like to emphasize La Sagrada Familia (built by "God's architect's" - Antoni Gaudí). It really was amazing and even both my children who are usually impressed by nothing except perhaps the latest computer game are now reverent Gaudí fans. Other highlights was the three-hour bike tour of the city as well as the amazing meals we had at some of the (close to a million) restaurants that dot the city. I think we could easily come to love living in that city if we can only find great schools for our kids first.

The one work-related task I did was to spend a day visiting and giving talks at the two universities I'm interested in visiting. I gave a morning talk at the technical university (UPC) about Computing within Limits as a research area and as an up-and-coming conference. I also gave a mid-day talk at the autonomous university (UAB) about the alternative history multi-paper project I lead and that charts the future of peak oil by placing it in the past. Both these talks are brand new (although I naturally reuse some slides from other talks) and I'm more than willing to give talks about these topics at departments and universities in or near Stockholm! I end this blog post by sharing the invitations to the two talks I held in Barcelona:


------- UPC morning talk ------

On Thursday the 3rd of November, Daniel Pargman, will be visiting UPC (Campus Nord) and give a talk from 9h-10h in Building C6 Room E101.

Title: Computing within Limits and the Sharing Economy/Collaborative Consumption

Talk: Computing within Limits is (to the best of my knowledge) the most hard-core sustainability community within computing as “LIMITS aims to foster discussion on the impact of present or future ecological, material, energetic, and/or societal limits on computing” (http://limits2016.org/). The Computing within Limits workshop/conference and the community around it (Pargman and Raghavan 2015) can be seen as a rebranded version of the earlier attempt at forming a community around the concept of “Collapse Informatics” (Tomlinson et. al. 2012, Tomlinson et. al. 2013).

In this talk I will:

- Present the underlying premises of Computing within Limits as well as the (future) trajectory of the workshop/community. 
- Discuss how the Sharing Economy/Collaborative Consumption aligns (or does not align) with Computing within Limits.
- Talk about and analyse some of the inherent contradictions of teaching sustainability/Limits for engineering students at a technical university.


------- UAB midday talk ------

On Thursday the 3rd of November, Daniel Pargman, Associate Professor of Media Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm will be visiting ICTA and give a talk from 12-1 at Aula Z-023 Espai Montseny.

Title: "On the effects of the early 1970s global peak in oil production”

Talk: This talk takes as its starting point the contrafactual (Ferguson 2000) statement “what if there ever only was half the oil in the ground when we started to use it 150 years ago?” E.g. what if there ever only was 1 instead of 2 trillion barrels of oil available in the ground back in the 19th century (Deffeyes 2006, Campbell 2013)?

Taking that statement as a starting point, an interdisciplinary group of researchers spanning literature studies, futures studies, design fiction, social sciences, systems analysis, history and natural resource research have embarked on a project to envision what a contrafactual post-peak oil world could look like. The goal is to construct an alternative present where peak oil happened in the early 1970’s and were we now (2017) have lived with the consequences for more than four decades. However difficult the task we have here set ourselves, it is much much easier for us to discern the global effects of peak oil in an alternative world where oil production peaked in the early 1970s (”Coalworld”) than what it is to predict the future of our world (”Oilworld”) for decades ahead.


------- Generic blurb for both talks ------

Guest lecturer: Daniel Pargman, Associate Professor of Media Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Bio: Daniel Pargman is an associate professor at the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is also affiliated with the VINN excellence research Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC). He is interested in energy research and social science, teaching sustainability and computing within limits. He blogs at danielpargman.blogspot.com.

NordiCHI 2016 in Gothenburg (conference)

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I attended the NordiCHI conference in Gothenburg last week (October 25-27). The full and more impressive name is the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction and this year's theme was "Game-changing design". I have also attended the 1st NordiCHI conference (in Stockholm in 2000) and the 8th NordiCHI conference (in Helsinki in 2014) and I expect to attend the 10th NordiCHI conference that will be held in Oslo two years from now (in 2018 between Sept 29-Oct 3).

My colleague Elina, me and five other colleagues held a workshop the day before the conference (Oct 24), "HCI and UN's Sustainable Development Goals" and I wrote a separate blog post about the workshop last week.

The conference venue, "Lindholmen Conference Center", was nice and I very much appreciate that not only coffee but also lunches were included in the conference fee. The fact that the lunch break was free, on-site and 1.5 hours long made for effective networking. Or rather for effective collaboration; I had working lunches every single day and used those precious hours to discuss and plan for paper together with Oliver Bates (Tuesday), Hanna Hasselqvist (Wednesday) and Staffan Björk & Maria Håkansson (Thursday). Staffan recently came to Stockholm to give two guest lectures in my project course about The Future of Computer Games, but he was also the general (co-)chair of the conference so I especially appreciated that he had the opportunity to take time off to discuss a really exciting writing project we started to talk about already when he visited Stockholm in the beginning of October.

Staffan rattled of some facts about the conference from the stage when it started;
- No less than 329 papers were submitted (231 full papers, 98 short papers) and 76 papers from 38 countries were accepted (23%).
- There were 60 associate chairs and no less than 577 reviewers.
- There were 22 submitted workshop proposals and 15 workshops were held (including ours)
- There were 420 attendees when the conference started (it was possible to buy on-site one-day passes) from at least 34 countries.

To those fact I can add the fact that both of my submissions to the conference (aimed at the "Future Scenarios track") were rejected despite getting ok or better-than-average reviews. We have since already reworked one of the papers and submitted it to another conference.

The conference is a relatively small conference with two parallell academic tracks and some other activities in parallell (industry track, poster session, demos, student competition) as well as (of course) a social program for the evenings. A big difference between this conference and the huge CHI conference with 15 or so parallell tracks is that I become abruptly reminded of the fact that I am actually not particularly interested in the majority of what is characterized as HCI research. I'd say that I'm perhaps genuinely interested in only 10-20% of the research in this domain.

There were however some presentation that caught my attention I briefly list them here and add a comment that describes the paper and why I thought it was interesting (but I might have misunderstood something or forgotten some in the 10 or so days since I heard the presentations). I plan to print and read (at least) these papers from the conference:

• "Informing Design Decisions for Advice Mediating Handheld Devices by Studyng Coffee Cup reading" by Börütecene et. al. This was a really fun presentation. These crazy Turks had studied the practice of Turkish women reading the fortune? future? of their friends in the remains at the bottom of the coffee cup. They were particularly interested in how they used one hand to hole the coffee cup (think cell phone) and the other hand/arm to dramatize the results. I'm not 100% sure but I guess they hope to find some implications of this practice that is relevant to how we use our cell phones. 
• "Traces as an Approach to Design for Focal Things and Practices" by Robbins et. al. This was an explorative design study and what caught my attention was the authors use of a STS scholar, Borgmann and a book of his from 1984, "Technology and the character of contemporary life". The presenter in particular described the different between how we heated our homes in premodern times (chopping wood etc.) compared to today and I will primarily use this paper as an entrance to Borgmann.
• "Informing Design for Reflection. an Overview of Current Everyday Practices" by Mols et. al. On reflection practices in everyday life and how to support them (with, I suppose, some sort of digital tools).  It might be that everyday reflection is waning as we use our smartphones to play casual games at every occasion when we have time to kill (waiting in line, on the subway etc.). Walking was a setting that encourages reflection but that activity might nowadays be replaced by hunting Pokemon when we are on the go? 
• "Involving End-Users in Game Based Ideation A case Study in Hospital Logistics" by Huyghe et. al. The authors had used a board game to troubleshoot problems at a large hospital and I think the development of the game, the way they used it and the outcomes were very innovative and interesting. This is a sure read as we have also used a board games in our education (and written about it earlier this year).
• I guess I will also at least have a look at all the six accepted papers in the Future Scenarios session ("panel").

I naturally also like the two Sustainable HCI papers that were presented at the conference:

• "HeatDial: Beyond User Scheduling in Eco-Interaction" by Hagensby Jensen et. al.
• "Eco-Feedback Visualization for Closing the Gap of Organic Food Consumption" by my colleagues Jorge Zapico, Cecilia Katzeff, Ulrica Bohné and Rebecka Milestad.

The conference also had three keynote speakers and I reacted very differently to those three speakers and quite badly to two of them:

The first keynote speaker was Erik Stolterman (blog). He is a Swede living in exile at Indiana University (rubbing shoulders with Eli Blevis, the Bardzells and Hamid Ekbia). His keynote reported on an ongoing investigation of his (together with Jan-Erik Janlert at Umeå University) about the characteristics of interactivity, interaction, and interface. They were friends as ph.d. students and have recurrently investigated this topic for the last 25 years. I only listened for some minutes before I decided that I would buy and read their upcoming book on this topic (MIT Press 2017) and then for the most part zoned out of the talk. Stolterman seemed to know what he was talking about, and who wouldn't after having spent 25 years thinking about a particular topic? That's a feat and that reason alone almost merits having your book read in and of itself!

The second speaker was experimental physicist Jacob Sherson who talked about "Citizen Science Game Design: Harnessing the Power of Human Intuition". While he described lots of "exciting" research problems that were being solved by crowdsourcing, I tried to figure out what vision he had of the good society (that his research would help usher in) and couldn't really see that he had thought much about the implications of his research at all. He was very much into crowdsourcing and described a simple game for solving some really complicated real-world physics problems. He spoke reverently of one of his best players, a taxi driver, who described his strategy poetically and in such a way that every sentence could (apparently) be turned into equations. But how will Sherson repay this taxi driver and the research he does for free on Sherson's behalf? I would think that the most probable outcome is for Sherson to crowdsource for people to analyze and "solve" "traffic situations", eventually replacing the taxi driver with an autonomous vehicle that will put him out of his job. Which I told him as part of the question I asked him after his talk. I am here very much inspired by the work that Silberman and Irani have done on Amazon Mechanical Turk and "Turkopticon" (here, here and here) as well as Ekbia and Nardi's work on "Heteromation" (here and here). It is a fine line to walk between Sherson's "citizen science" and "getting people to work for you for free"...

I managed not just to ask a question but also to be the first to ask a question. One thing I referred to in my question was the 2014 alt.chi paper by Kirman et. al., "CHI and The Future Robot Enslavement of humankind". The authors pretend to be robots from the future who have travelled back in time to thank humanity for all the great research we conducted and that made the future robot enslavement of humankind inevitable at the point in time when the paper was presented (2014). The authors then go about and enumerate research they consider harmful to human freedom and those aspects we value in  human societies. I could not remember exactly what research they referred to but told Sherson that his research, as far as I could recall, would probably fit right in there. My question wasn't just a rant but actually ended in a question and I guess I did get an answer of sorts (but not particularly satisfying). It felt to me like Sherson might have been a bit subdued when he agreed that the aspects I mentioned are important and that he [something that I don't really remember]. I guess one of the reasons I took badly to this talk was because certain parts of it reminded me of the Clueless AI researcher I listened to and blogged about back in 2011.

I also had problems with the last keynote speaker, Anna Rosling Rönnlund (who is married to Hans Rosling's son). She works for the Gapminder foundation (Wikipedia) and she has definitely drunk the Kool-Aid. Much of her talk was interesting and the Dollar Street project was riveting and I wholeheartedly recommend a visit to that street! Most Swedes think they belong to the middle class when we in fact belong to the global overclass. Don't believer me - check it out on Dollar Street! We also think "the poor" in Sweden are poor, but they too belong to the global upperclass (or the upper middle class) and Dollar Street drives home that message once and for all.

I also don't have a problem with the spiel about us living with a world view that we got from Tintin comics as of 50 years ago and where there is us (rich) and them (poor). The world is obviously much more complicated and it is also a much better (or at least more affluent) place than what many of us seem to think. Rosling Rönnlund reported on asking people a variety of questions regarding if the world is getting better or worse and they consistently got answers that show how out of touch people are with actual developments in the world during the last 50 years. The world has consistently gotten better (child mortality, # people who have died in wars, due to extreme weather events, disease, absolute poverty etc.), but most affluent westerners think it has gotten consistently worse.

I did however have problems when Rosling Rönnlund suggested that due to past trends, things will continue to get better in the future. I again managed to get the microphone first and suggested that her question "Is the world getting better or worse?" could be divided into two questions: "Has the world gotten better or worse?" and "Will the world get better or worse?". The answer to the first question is obviously "yes" (and Gapminder had massive evidence of this). As to the second questions, well, we just don't know. Some current trends point towards "better" but other trends point towards "worse" and the truth is that we just don't know. I guess it depends on which trends you think will be the more important and more dominant.

After having laid that foundation I switched track and suggested that Rosling Rönnlund was playing the same game that my personal bankwoman has tried half a dozen times before she gave up on me (I have stopped seeing her now). My personal bankwoman showed me a lot of attractive curves that all seemed to suggest a date with wealth in my future - if only I invested money in their wonderful mutual funds. But (and this is a Big "but"), each and every attractive-curve fund also came with an important proviso stating that "historical data is no guarantee for future yield". So we know about the past and we can extrapolate forward in time but that actually says very little - and guarantees even less - about what the future has in store. I expressed this even more concisely by telling her that I just peed in my pants and could she please guess if I now feel better, the same or worse than five second ago? The fact that it feels so much better right now is a bad predictor of how I will feel a minute from now...

No one can dispute trends based on the history of the 20th century (and the 21st century this far), but those trends say very little about the future. I politely thus suggested that her 20th-century-trends (and the extrapolation of said trends into the future) were deceptive because we cannot with certainty say very much about the future and forecasting always always misses all the important game-changers, the black swans and the wild cards.

So what was her answer? She totally agreed and pointed out that it was in fact only the population trend that she/Gapminder extrapolated into the (far) future year of 2100. I noticed that she knew exactly what I meant (she had probably heard the same critique many times before), but I still caught her disregarding her own answer when she answered other people's questions. She for example stated that people have a too gloomy view of the future and that that's one of the motivations behind the Gapminder projects. I could again have reminded her of the fact that "historical data is not a guarantee for future trends"! It might be that people have been too gloomy again and again in the past, but that does not disprove gloominess as a good predictor of the future right now, it only disproves past gloominess. It could thus be totally justified to be gloomy about the future and nothing - Nothing - of what Gapminder does (no matter how much data they collect!) can disprove that. And unless Gapminderers are very clear about what exactly it is they do and how they do it, they do for the most part travel around the world, spreading a messianic message about the future that could be totally untrue and at least isn't very nuanced. Which I told her. But it didn't seem to make a difference.

My association with futures studies persons at KTH (Mattias Höjer, Josefin Wangel, Ulrika Gunnarsson Östling, Luciane Borges) has sensitized me a lot to how we can talk about the future when these futures studies researchers talk about probable, plausible, possible and preferable future as well as about the differences between various techniques, e.g. forecasting vs backcasting etc. Forecasting just has a unjustified good reputation, something that is hinted in the very titles of these two articles:

• Smil, V., 2000. Perils of long-range energy forecasting: reflections on looking far ahead. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 65(3):251–264.
• Bezdek, R.H., Wendling, R.M., 2002. A half century of long-range energy forecasts: errors made, lessons learned, and implications for forecasting. Journal of Fusion Energy, 212(3–4), 155–172.

The errors made are many, the lessons learned are few and the implications for forecasting are for the most part damning. Heres a quote from a paper I'm just now writing (I did not formulate these particular words): "forecasts have missed virtually every important shift of the past decades as well as all sudden, dramatic and unexpected changes or deviations from trends that have been extrapolated".

Here's a quote from another paper that I've written together with others but these are words that I have personally formulated (it's from a paper that is currently being under review): "Science fiction author William Gibson is known for repeatedly having stated that “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” [...]. From a Collapse informatics and a Computing within Limits perspective it makes just as much sense to state that "The collapse is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed." The collapse in question is readily at display in places such as Detroit, Greece, Afghanistan, Syria and in various failed states, and it can also be captured by a large and increasing set of keywords such as mass unemployment, metastasizing slums, stagnating social mobility, crumbling welfare states, peak oil, scarcity of energy and water resources as well as by various effects of climate change."

For anyone who has drank the Cool-Aid (e.g. everyone who works at Gapminder or who devours Gapminder's (ideological) message), I would recommend them to read Harald Welzer's 2008/2012 book "Climate wars: Why people will be killed in the 21st century". It is riveting, terrible and terrifying all at once and is the best prediction I have seen of the near future (2007-2016). It predicts recent and current trends much better than all the Pollyannaish books that extolls the virtues of humankind and describes how everything keeps getting better all the time. Climate wars unfortunately does not at all point to a very nice future even as the author intensely hopes that he is wrong.

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Before the Flood (movie)

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We organized a movie night tonight at KTH and screened the brand new documentary "Before the Flood" for a limited number (50) of our students. We saw the movie in the KTH Visualization Studie (Facebook group) and watched it on their huge 4K screen.

Leonardo DiCaprio narrates the movie and it is presented by National Geographic. It's possible to stream the film for free on the National Geographic Channels and on YouTube etc. until Nov 7 so go see it! You can start by checking out the 3-minute trailer and here's the movie's official blurb:

“Before the Flood captures a three-year personal journey alongside Academy Award-winning actor and U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio as he interviews individuals from every facet of society in both developing and developed nations who provide unique, impassioned and pragmatic views on what must be done today and in the future to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.”

The movie has a homepage as well as a Facebook group and I brought my kids (13 and 9) to watch it. Their reactions were very different. The elder thought it was "shocking" will the younger thought it was endlessly boring (not "boring" but bo-ring). The students seemed to like it though. I'm sure many would have appreciated a short discussion or perhaps someone suggesting that those who wanted to could continue somewhere to discuss the movie over a beer. I had my kids to think of so I had to hurry home but I would otherwise have loved to suggest that. Also, we had had very little time to prepare for the movie and so we hadn't much thought about what would happen after the movie before the move - we were just amazed that we managed to get it all together with such short notice. If fact, how the event came together is interesting in itself.

I wrote a blog post more than three years ago (in February 2013) called "I'm an activist!". Beyond the issue that I was engaged in at the time, I also reflected upon how easy it was to organize ourselves with the low-cost social media tools that nowadays help us coordinate and make what was once exceedingly difficult soo easy. The same thing happened in the run-up to this movie screening.

My colleague Elina posted the trailer on Facebook Friday evening (four days ago) at 19.45. A little later (21.15) she asks another colleague of ours, Mario, "if it would be possible to watch it in the visualization studie sometime during the upcoming week". Mario answer "yes, of course" around midnight. I dive into the discussion Saturday morning (at 10) and start to structure the week (pros and cons of selecting different weekdays). After lunch Elina creates a Facebook chat channel with four members; herself, me, Mario and Erica-Dawn who works at KTH Sustainability Office and has access to contacts and (some) money. Things then just happen by itself, with everybody pitching in with questions, comments, answers and by offering up resources. At 18.30 I created a Google document, sifted through the Facebook discussion that far, structured up the available information and identified missing information.

Sunday for the most part was a day of resting but on Monday Mario prepared the studio and Erica-Dawn poured the information into an invitation (see above) and  disseminated the invitation (we had together suggested suitable channels, including disseminating it to my colleagues at MID4S and CESC). Erica-Dawn also secured serious amounts of popcorn and we were all set! I didn't do that much but I did have the pleasure of being able to invite the 60+ students who take my brand new course (it stared Monday) to an exclusive movie screening during the very introductory lecture of the course - one day before the screening. Although it kind of felt like I slacked off Sunday-Monday, I guess I'm doing my bit by documenting the event, i.e. by writing this blog post!

It's pretty cool how it all came together so quickly and with so little effort. It was the right people with access to the right tools and the right resources and things then kind of just happened by themselves. So I guess this blog post is written in praise of lightweight social media tools, of my great colleagues at KTH, of DiCaprio (and the movie producers and National Geographic) and of course also the 50 or so students who showed up and filled up the room. Thank you all!

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