Help save the world! We are hiring a ph.d. student!

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The image comes from the web page "Being a doctoral student at KTH"

I've haven't blogged much in the last 12+ months. I did however write a blog post in January about a research grant application we submitted, "Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: From data to practice" and I did in fact end that blog post like this:

"If there ever was an application where it felt like we hit all the marks, well, then this is it. We were definitely on a high as we handed in the application. The Energy Agency will hand out funds for at least 10 projects and we have so much faith in our application that we were confident there just can't be 10 other applications that are better than our. We hope."

I really ought to have written a blog post before the summer when we found out that the project was approved. I might in fact still do that retroactively (I will then edit this introduction) and I should also write a blog post about what has happened in the project this far/during the start-up phase (e.g. during the autumn). Do however also see this blog post where the first three master's-level project course proposals are related to this particular research project.

This blog post is however an announcement that we just placed an ad and that we are hiring! We are looking for a ph.d. student who wants to join our project and our research group! 

The job ad is available here (in English) and here (in Swedish) and the deadline to apply is Thursday November 7. We will then set aside time to sort out applications that do not fulfil the formal requirement and then try to further winnow down the applications to get between 3-5 applicants that we think are highly interesting.

Me and my colleague Elina Eriksson put together the ad. Much of it consists of boilerplate text - text that will be found in any ad for a ph.d. position at KTH (e.g. we offer "Work and study in Stockholm, one of Europe’s fastest-growing capitals, which is close to both nature and the sea"). I will here point out the significant parts of the ad that makes it different from other ads.

1) The super-short description of the project that the ph.d. student will work in and what his/her tasks mainly will consist of:

You will join an interdisciplinary research project that aims to decrease carbon emissions in flight-intensive organizations. We work collaboratively with other ongoing efforts to decrease carbon emissions at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The project will develop interaction tools and methods to visualize, engage and help individuals and departments to become aware of and decrease unnecessary flying. You will help us explore and develop novel concepts and design proposals to support behavior change on an individual and organizational level. Our project will contribute to KTH’s overarching sustainability goal to decrease carbon emissions from flight with 20% during the current four-year period.

2) We are looking for someone who wants to work with sustainability and design and has (some kind of) background in design is a requirement:

Eligibility 

To be admitted to postgraduate education (Chapter 7, 39 § Swedish Higher Education Ordinance), the applicant must [...]

• have a specialisation (or prior experience) in design, for example interaction design. 

Comment: there are several requirements that are non-negotiable such as for example having passed a degree at an advanced level (same for all ph.d. positions at KTH). We added this requirement to this particular ph.d. position and it means that many who might have wanted to apply will not be able to do so (or will be sorted away in the first pass). While design background/experience is a requirement, we are pretty open about what kind of design. While we exemplify with "interaction design" (something that allows students from our own engineering programme in media technology to apply), other types of designers are also welcome to apply, for example industrial designers, service designers, (user) experience designers etc. 

3) While some kind of design experience/background is a requirement, there is also a less binding wish list of characteristics of which most (again) consists of boilerplate text (e.g. the applicant should have the "ability to independently pursue his or her work" but also the "ability to collaborate with others"). The following two criteria have however been added by us for this ph.d. position in particular:

Selection 

In order to succeed as a doctoral student at KTH, you need to be goal oriented and persevering in your work. In the selection of the applicants, the following will be assessed: 

[...]

• ability to come up with ideas and new approaches (creativity), and

• English proficiency in reading, writing and speaking.

Comment: it is hard for me to imagine hiring someone who isn't good or at least decent at writing. For someone who finds writing to be tedious and difficult, my general advice would be to not apply for a ph.d. position. Five years as a ph.d. student for for the person who hates writing would mean a world of pain. I'm surprised that proficiency in reading and writing in English isn't a requirement for all ph.d. positions at our university. 

Comment: the creativity criteria will be a bit tricky to evaluate but we felt that the project really needs a person who has an innovative way of thinking which can be put into practice and which leads to results. This criteria also fits together with the design requirement above. The project will include various "design interventions" and we want someone who is creative and can contribute with new ideas!

4) As to what background material to hand in as part of the application, we added the following two elements (besides a CV, a degree certificate etc.):

• Contact information for at least two reference persons. 

• Your master’s thesis or a representative equivalent publication or technical report. 

Comment: we will in fact check this up carefully for the last 3-5 applicants that we will choose between!

5) To those who have studied at KTH, who have met me elsewhere or will get a tip about this ph.d. position from someone who knows me, I imagine this could in fact make a difference:

Supervision: The doctoral student will be placed at the Royal Institute of Technology and supervised by associate professor Daniel Pargman.

6) Lastly, we want to emphasise that the ph.d. student will become part of an up-and-coming research group with many different research projects and and that he/she will become part of an exciting research environment:

What we offer: [...]

• You will be part of the sustainability research group at the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design. This group has recently started several new research projects and is at the forefront of research and teaching in the area of computing and sustainability. For more information, see our web page.

Me and Elina spent half a day this past week disseminating the ad in various networks such as:

- Our department, our research group and in other research groups at KTH.

- Facebook, Twitter.

- In various relevant distribution lists.

- To people/in networks of researchers who look at problematising or reducing (academic) flying.

- To individuals we know personally who work with sustainability and/or design.

- We also hope to reach alumni from our media technology engineering programme through colleagues of ours but don't know if this has or will happen.

Some colleagues have helped further disseminate the ad on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you! Please disseminate the link to this blog post too!

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Homo Colossus application approved!

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Hooray! Our 3-year science + art + communication project, "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus: Visualising our energy footprint" has been approved! I wrote a blog post about this application when we handed it in (back in April 2019).

That means I will work together with Mario Romero (KTH), Åsa Andersson Broms (Kungl. Konsthögskolan), Per Hasselberg (Konstfrämjandet) and Belinda Hellberg (Changency) between 2020-2022 on a very exciting project - and that we will meet regularly for the next three years!

The assessment (see above) was very positive ("this is, communication-wise, an exciting and innovative project with a clear strategy", "the project team has a very high competence" etc.) and the final assessment of the whole application/project was the best possible grade, "Outstanding" (one step above "Excellent"). The application was also deemed to be "Outstanding" in terms of "societal relevance" and it was deemed to be "Excellent" in terms of "research quality" and "communication efforts".

It's fair to say that we by now partly have "squandered" the seed money we got from KTH at the end of last year since we primarily have used that money for writing applications instead of doing what we were supposed to. We have basically and for the most part used the seed money (0.08 MSEK) to write two applications:
- We applied for money for a Small Visionary Project (0.3 MSEK) a month ago.
- We also applied for this now-approved Formas communication grant (1.9 MSEK) back in April.

Despite the fact that we are not on track to do what we were supposed to, I still think the seed money was money well spent by KTH. But I have to find a way to explain why we won't deliver what we were supposed to at the end of the year... Also, it certainly feels like we should spend the remaining money/time to start to plan for the new 3-year project rather than doing a rush job and delivering a sub-standard report at the end of the year.


Comment: This blog post was written at a later point in time and has been back-dated. I have later heard that our application got the highest grade of all the 10 applications that were approved.
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Proposals for our project course on Interactive Media Technology (course)

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Our "Advanced Project course in Interactive Media Technology" (DM2799) will be held for the third time this autumn term (primarily in November and December):

"The course is an advanced project course, where the students [in groups of 3-5 students] carry out a smaller research study in close cooperation with researchers in the field of interactive media technology."

This course (3-minute video) is interesting for various reasons and one reason is that most students who take the course are fifth-year students. That means they have lots of knowledge and experience and that they can get a lot done despite the fact that most of the work in these projects are performed over a period of less than two months. Another thing that is interesting is that the project course is followed by their master's thesis and while many students would like to do their thesis with a company as their client, it also represents a chance to recruit students to do their master's thesis in a research project.

The sustainability team that I lead together with Elina now has several new research projects up and running and we also have a strong tradition of writing project proposals for this course and getting them manned. I have personally been the advisor of five different project groups during the previous two course offerings.

This year we have a very strong line-up of sustainability-related project proposals and I will list all our proposals below. New for this year is that the students will specify their preferences and be organised into project groups a month before the course starts. This has forced us to write our project proposals earlier during the term, but, the start of the course and the start of these projects will be much smoother than before - the students and their projects will get off to a "flying start" compared to earlier years.

Below are our 12 sustainability-related proposals and further below are descriptions of all projects in terms of title, background and task (some additional information has been removed, this blog post will be long enough as it is).

[UPDATE (October 8): titles in orange have been chosen by groups of students who will work with them during the remainder of the year]

- Flightminder - Gapminder for KTH’s flight data (FLIGHT advisors: Daniel Pargman and Mario Romero)
- Communicating data beyond digital screens (FLIGHT advisor: Elina Eriksson)
- CERO Challenge (FLIGHT advisor: Elina Eriksson)
- Bringing Homo Colossus to life (KTH campus edition) (HC advisors: Daniel Pargman and Mario Romero)
- Bringing Homo Colossus to life (City of Stockholm edition) (HC advisors: Daniel Pargman and Mario Romero)
- Exploring human powered interaction (advisor: Anders Lundström)
- Climate map - carbon budget made visible for municipalities (advisor: Elina Eriksson)

- HabitWise – design of climate calculators to create sustainable habits (HABITWISE advisors: Elina Eriksson and Cecilia Katzeff)

- Non-intrusive social reminders for sustainable food behaviour (KITCHEN advisor: Björn Hedin)

- Sharing preference-based adjustments of online recipes (KITCHEN advisor: Björn Hedin)

- Making Hippo Hip Again - Redesign of a food inventory system (KITCHEN advisor: Miriam Börjesson Rivera)
- Meat-O-Meter - changing meat consumption behavior (KITCHEN advisor: Björn Hedin and Jarmo Laaksolahti)

The majority of these project proposals are directly related to ongoing research projects in our research group (MID4). That is an advantage for students choosing these projects since each research project has a network of researchers attached to it who have a lot of goodwill towards these students projects and who are willing to spend time and energy to help the students. Also, project groups that yield interesting results could easily result in ideas for master's thesis topics that these students could work on during the spring term (2020). For more information about these research project, follow these links: FLIGHT, HABITWISE and KITCHEN. The HC (Homo Colossus) project is brand new and does not yet have a homepage.

Here are the longer version of each project:

Flightminder - Gapminder for KTH’s flight data

Background
KTH has set up goals to reduce our carbon emissions. Decreasing employees’ flying is a prioritised area since researchers fly a lot (to scientific conferences etc.), but in order to decrease our flying, we first need to understand our flying.

In a MID research project that just started, “Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations”(a.k.a. “FLIGHT”), we have access to all data for all KTH employees’ all travel during the previous 12 months. We will analyse this data from various perspectives but need your help to develop a tool that can help us visualise the data in useful and nifty ways.

Project/Task
Your task is to find ways to visualise our data and to develop a tool that will help us researchers work with our data in better ways over the coming years (the project runs between 2019-2022). You can think of your task in terms of developing Gapminder (see link below) for KTH’s flight data.

See “additional material” below for references to two recent academic studies that analyses the academic flying at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. We want to be able to replicate these studies and see if we get the same results when we plug our KTH data set into the tool you develop!

The KTH data set includes data about all 3700 employees’ all trips between September 2018 and August 2019. You will more specifically have access to this data:
For every employee: unique identifier, year of birth, gender, title (e.g. “professor” or “ph.d. student”), salary, school and department, purpose of the trip.
For every trip: unique identifier (person travelling), date, flight number, airport codes, type of ticket, price, estimated CO2 emissions

Communicating data beyond digital screens

Background
Climate change is real and we need to act quickly and cut our carbon emissions in order to fulfil the Paris agreement. Air travel is one of the fastest growing contributors to carbon emissions, and within academia, air travel has lately begun to be discussed. In a research project that recently started at MID, “Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations”, we support KTH in it’s goal to reduce employees’ carbon emission from travel (which to a large extent means flying). One way of reaching the goals that KTH has set for itself is to publicly communicate and raise awareness of the historical and current state of flying/carbon emissions and how these relate to KTH’s targets.

Project/Task
In this project we invite students to explore alternative and innovative ways of communicating travel data from KTH or the implications of KTH’s air travel and we want to see innovative suggestions beyond screen-based visualizations. We want you to find ways to make historical and current data on flying engaging and provocative! How can KTH’s data set be used in ways that help employees become more aware of our emissions and more prone to start acting to decrease them? A source for inspiration could be the master thesis work by Tomás Albrecht that developed the Publikkvitto prototype (see additional material for reference), but we would also invite other types of communication such as sonification, haptic feedback or smell.

CERO Challenge

Background
Emissions from transport and travel are a substantial part of the global emissions of carbon, and even though much transport is necessary and hard to cut down on, some are possible to change. However behaviour change is hard, and changing transport behaviour is difficult since it is intertwined with everyday practices. In this situation, digital tools can be of help, and one such tool that has been developed is CERO Challenge. CERO challenge is a tool to help people choose more sustainable travel choices. But, the tool need some care and love to really become engaging and useful.

Project/Task
In this project, we want a team to do a redesign of the CERO Challenge app. This would include an evaluation of the current user interface and the creation of a new interface (a high-fidelity mock-up, an implementation for android/IOS, or a combination). We encourage the student group to take a critical perspective and for example explore what alternative motivations (besides gamification) that could be used as drivers in the application. Here it could be interesting to explore Transcendental Values (see Common Cause handbook in additional material).

Bringing Homo Colossus to life (KTH campus edition)

Background
Fossil fuels account for ≈ 85% of mankind's primary energy supply. This is problematic for several reasons (climate change etc.) and we urgently need to phase out fossil fuels. But how do we convince people in more affluent countries that much will have to change, perhaps including highly valued aspects of our taken-for-granted lifestyles? How do we show that what we have come to perceive as “normal” in fact is anything but and that we today use extravagant amounts of energy (that eventually must come to an end)?

William Catton’s idea of “homo colossus” (Catton 1986, 1987) pushes home the point that each of us would be COLOSSAL if we imagined that our everyday energy consumption – the energy we use in our daily lives (for heating our homes, driving our cars, flying on vacation trips etc.) – instead was used to fuel a Huge Creature that physically ingested (ate) and metabolised the same amount of energy. It is easy for a Swede to use 50 to 100 times more energy in our everyday lives than the energy content of the food we eat (≈ 1700 kcal or 2 kWh per day for a person who weighs 70 kilos)! But how big would we be if we were huge and ATE all that energy instead, i.e. how big is the “energy footprint” of the average Swede and of his/her lifestyle??

Project/Task
The Homo Colossus “double” or “shadow” of the average Swede would be about 12 meters tall and weight about 25.000 kilos. Imagine building a 12 meters tall statue that represents “the average Swede” (e.g. the average Swede’s energy footprint)! You will not build that statue in this project, but you will model (Maya, Blender) and 3D print giant body parts (eg. toes, fingers, ears) and find a suitable place to install them on campus (for example sticking out of a building (wall) or up from the ground). You will then develop a smartphone app (using the ARCore Augmented Reality development kit) so that the rest of Homo Colossus’ body can be seen through the smartphone’s screen and with the help of an AR app.

You will also design a method to invite people to use the AR app on the public installation. People need to be aware of the fact the giant body parts are part of an AR installation and get information about how to see the AR augmentation. Your task is thus to design an intervention/information system that gets their attention, provide them with relevant information and invites explorations - be it posters, screens, in-app advertisements or some other method.

Bringing Homo Colossus to life (City of Stockholm edition)

Background

Fossil fuels account for ≈ 85% of mankind's primary energy supply. This is problematic for several reasons (climate change etc.) and we urgently need to phase out fossil fuels. But how do we convince people in more affluent countries that much will have to change, perhaps including highly valued aspects of our taken-for-granted lifestyles? How do we show that what we have come to perceive as “normal” in fact is anything but and that we today use extravagant amounts of energy (that eventually must come to an end)?

William Catton’s idea of “homo colossus” (Catton 1986, 1987) pushes home the point that each of us would be COLOSSAL if we imagined that our everyday energy consumption – the energy we use in our daily lives (for heating our homes, driving our cars, flying on vacation trips etc.) – instead was used to fuel a Huge Creature that physically ingested (ate) and metabolised the same amount of energy. It is easy for a Swede to use 50 to 100 times more energy in our everyday lives than the energy content of the food we eat (≈ 1700 kcal or 2 kWh per day for a person who weighs 70 kilos)! But how big would we be if we were huge and ATE all that energy instead, i.e. how big is the “energy footprint” of the average Swede and of his/her lifestyle??

Project/Task

The Homo Colossus “double” or “shadow” of the average Swede would be about 12 meters tall and weight about 25.000 kilos. Imagine building a 12 meters tall statue that represents “the average Swede” (e.g. the average Swede’s energy footprint)! You will not build that statue in this project, but you will “recruit” one or more pieces of public art (life-sized statues of people) in the City of Stockholm. You will then develop a smartphone app (using the ARCore Augmented Reality development kit) so that the statue/statues are endowed with huge Homo Colossus “shadows” that can be seen through the smartphone’s screen and with the help of an AR app. 

You will also design a method to invite people to use the AR app on these public sculptures. People need to be aware of the location and the identity of the statues that have been augmented and how to see the AR augmentation. Your task is thus to design an intervention/information system that gets their attention, provide them with relevant information and invites explorations - be it posters, screens, in-app advertisements or some other method.

Exploring human powered interaction

Project/Task

You will explore the potential of powering interactive artefacts through so called “human-powered interaction” (HPI). In HPI, the aim is that the power needed to run the device should be acquired through interacting with - and simultaneously “charging” - the device. “Charging” is a nice metaphor but is in fact the wrong term because as apart from “harvesting” energy from human activity (for example through a dynamo that charges a smartphone battery), there is no battery to charge in HPI. The energy that is generated by your physical activity is used up as it is generated, and in fact constitutes a design material of sorts.

One early example of HPI was “The Peppermill” [1] which describes a simple circuit and a human powered peppermill remote control for a TV. The theory around HPI has been further discussed in a paper by James Pierce and Eric Paulos (“Electric materialities and interactive technology”) [2] in which they argue that HPI originates from human physical activity and becomes a part of the interactive experience itself. Power generation is both the source of the interaction and becomes part of the interactive experience!

“If the source of power is generated only via one’s interaction with the technology and experienced as such, then one does not experience the power as external to the immediate context of use as can be the case with ordinary electric technology. Instead, one can experience this power as something able to be personally generated or created.” [2, p. 6]

Interestingly, little has been done from a design perspective to advance this research area despite the increasing interest in sustainable technology. 

Climate map - carbon budget made visible for municipalities

Background
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (PPM) can be measured with high accuracy and we know how much we can emit to keep within certain global mean temperature increases. This is also the scientific basis for what has come to be called the budget perspective: the realization that carbon dioxide accumulates and that we must limit the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere within certain relatively well-known limits in order to meet global temperature targets.

The Climate Map is a non-profit company that was formed in early 2019. We are developing a digital carbon dioxide budget tool together with the Uppsala researchers. We will in the first hand turn to Swedish municipalities, but eventually we also want to reach regions, nations and individuals.

The background to the tool is that in order to adapt our (or a municipality’s) emissions to the global remaining carbon dioxide budget (and thus indirectly to one of the two temperature targets of the Paris Agreement), we (as individuals, municipalities, regions and countries) must first determine what proportion of this global budget is ours. There are different methods for doing so. The easiest one to apply a "flat model" where all the world's current inhabitants are allocated an equal budget. We will apply this 'flat model' as a kind of default mode, or starting position, in our interface, but also allow the user to make additional assumptions and adjust their budget, for example to take into account OECD countries' historical emissions debt.

Project/Task
In this task we want to get suggestions on how we can visualize this a carbon budget with the default mode, that is an equal share of the remaining carbon budget. The prospective user/recipient is a Swedish municipality.

We would therefore like to see proposals for an interface that makes visible our remaining global carbon dioxide budget and a Swedish municipality's share of this. We want it, as visually and intuitively as possible, to show how the municipal budget is calculated (using the Greenpeace flat model where there is a division first (of all now living people), then a multiplication (by the number of inhabitants in the municipality)). In summary, we want the user to meet a visual representation of his/her municipality's carbon dioxide budget, but also as intuitively and directly as possible, understand how this is calculated, and also see its proportional relation to our remaining global budget.

HabitWise – design of climate calculators to create sustainable habits

Background

Human impact on the climate is one of our time’s biggest challenges. Consumption within Swedish households contribute to around 80% of Sweden’s consumption based climate emissions (Swedish EPA 2017). Considering the impact of different categories of consumption from the average Swede, food consumption generates the largest impact, followed by transport, housing, and other shopping. These categories can be measured and communicated to households. This communication holds
a prospect of people learning about their impact and taking steps to change their lifestyles to decrease their impact.

In one way, climate impact tools are the “culmination” of climate impact research. Through these tools, knowledge is available to people outside the scientific community. But what needs to be communicated and what aspects have a lasting impact? We aim to understand how the tools can be improved to bridge science and society toward sustainable development. Several climate calculators are available for households to use. They review climate footprint and, in some cases, suggest how to develop more sustainable consumption patterns. However, little research is available on
systematic user studies providing fruitful information on how to design of climate calculators to best fit their users.

  

The project

We want to know how climate footprint calculators can be designed and implemented to encourage users to lifestyle changes. Hence we would like to invite a group to do an evaluation study (which would be a pre-study for our larger research project), where one climate calculator is evaluated with users.

Potentially this could be a think-aloud study of c:a 5-10 individual household users of 1 selected footprint tool. Selection of test users should aim for balancing gender, age and education. It could also include an expert evaluation and (concept) design of a new interface, new features etc.

Potentially the project could meet the respondents twice, in order to after a few weeks, see what the respondents remember and/if they have started doing any changes in their life.

The work will be part of the project HabitWise – Creating Sustainable Everyday Habits.

Here, the particular tool Habit is used

Non-intrusive social reminders for sustainable food behaviour

Background 

Food is something we all have a relationship with, whether we like it or not. Food is also an area where we ourselves often think we could, or should behave differently. We might want to eat more vegetables for one or more reasons (health, climate issues, animal welfare etc), generate less food waste, eat less candy, follow diet X, eat more fruit, spend less money on impulse purchases and so on. However, changing such behaviours is easier said than done. 

Research on supporting behaviour change has been conducted for a long time, especially within the areas of health and medicine (i.e. stop smoking) but the technological advances have in recent years opened up the sub-field of digital behaviour change, where digital tools and services are used to support behaviour change. In my research projects we try out new digital technologies to promote more sustainable behaviour around food and for more sustainable kitchen practices. This project is about designing a device for supporting “Non-intrusive social reminders for sustainable food behaviour”.

Project/Task 

This project for the advanced course aims at designing, building and testing a digital connected device (see below) to support more sustainable kitchen- and food behaviours. The designs should be grounded in the “behaviour change wheel” model/framework and the “behaviour change taxonomy v1”. The device should preliminary use the behaviour change techniques “goal setting”, “prompts/cues”, “social support”, “information about other’s approval” from the Behaviour change taxonomy, but choosing behaviour change techniques is a part of the project work.

The basic idea that a group of friends should each have a device. The friends should all share a real interest in improving some (or preferably several) sustainability or health aspect about their food and kitchen practices, such as eat fruit before it turns bad in order to avoid food waste, clean out the fridge, eat healthier/more sustainable and so on. When a person performs some such activity that makes the person feel satisfied with themselves (in a broad sense), the person pushes a button on the device. That makes one led-light light up on the device, and on all their friends’ devices. This serves as a trigger/cue for the friends to remind them that perhaps they should also do something “good”. As more friends do something they are satisfied with, more lights light up on the groups’ devices, creating a collective feeling that the group is doing well. Each night the lights are turned off, and the procedure starts again next day. The devices should be placed in the kitchen of the participants, so that the lights are visible (but not intrusive) when the persons are located in a physical location where it is easy to do “good” food-related behaviours.

The project should make a well-grounded theoretical argument of the design they choose. Of special importance is the grounding the design in the behaviour change models and frameworks described above. The devices should be built with the aim that it should be possible for our research project to build and test the devices during the spring (a possible master’s thesis for participants in the project), and a publicly available instructable of how to build the device should be provided. The devices should then be tested on real users of the target group, and the designs and devices should be qualitatively evaluated from both a design and a behaviour change perspective.

Sharing preference-based adjustments of online recipes

Background 

In society today we today see an increased interest in what we eat, and the number of people with specific preferences (such as vegetarian, low-fat, high-fat, gluten free, climate friendly, non-from-country-x …) are rapidly increasing. In on-line recipes, users often give suggestions of how to modify recipes according such preferences or tastes, but the comments are then provided in the comment field, and a suggestion to replace for example a meat-based ingredient with a vegetarian alternative would not make the recipe appear as “vegetarian” on the recipe website, and vegetarians would probably never find the recipe even though the modified version is now vegetarian. A structured way to provide suggestions of how to modify recipes in a computer-readable way is an interesting research topic that would increase the usefulness of online recipe sites, and support users in finding new recipes that supports their personal preferences.

Project/Task 

This advanced project suggestion is about designing, developing and evaluating a web-plugin (or similar solution) that recognizes the ingredients on one (or several) recipe sites such as Tasteline.se, and allows users to in a user-friendly and structured way suggest replacing one or more ingredients by other ingredients. The suggestions should be categorized  with one or more “reasons”  (i.e. to make it vegetarian, to decrease the number of calories, to make it tastier …), and it should be possible for other users to in some way rate how good the suggestion is. Other users, using the plugin, should then be able to see that there is a suggestion when they go to the site, and if they have provided personal preferences (such as “lactose free”, “low CO2”) such suggestions should be more easily visible. Other features can be developed as part of the course (such as being able to search for all recipes that have been modified in a specific way, subscription to changes made by specific people, CO2 footprint of recipes and so on). The design should be grounded in the behaviour change wheel framework. Depending on the outcome, this project can also be developed to a master thesis project in the spring.

Making Hippo Hip Again - Redesign of a food inventory system

Background

At the MID-department, there are several research projects related to food waste and sustainable kitchen practices. Within one of these projects, HIPPO, a scanner connected to a digital inventory web application has been developed as a prototype. HIPPO helps you to keep track of what you have in your cupboards, fridge and freezer, and ultimately is a way to keep you from overbuying food that then ends up as food waste.

Project/Task

The mission, should you accept it, is the do some new design thinking around the HIPPO prototype. The prototype in its current form runs the risk of mainly attracting certain segments of consumers (e.g. Resource Man (Strengers, 2014)). Hence we wish you to in this project rethink and redesign the system so that it attracts other types of consumers. What could HIPPO look like, how could users be enticed to use it and what would its purpose be?

Meat-O-Meter - changing meat consumption behavior

Background

Production and consumption of meat, as well as dairy products, is a major source of carbon emissions globally and has a large environmental impact overall. The system sustaining meat production/consumption is complex and includes many areas including but not limited to feed production,animal husbandry, transport, and even political/economical systems regulating production and consumption, import and export, subsidies etc. While a general awareness of the fact that meat, especially imported meat, might not be the most sustainable option is growing, the scale and details of the issue often remains unclear.

Project/Task

This project revolves around creating a tool (e.g visualisation, sonification, or physical installation) that can shed light on, and raise awareness of, relevant aspects of the meat production system, its scale, and impact. Based on real-time data of meat purchases through the service Matlistan.se we want you to develop a tool that can cast light on relevant aspects of the meat production chain thereby promoting awareness/insights leading to informed choices and/or behavior change. The tool should be in the form of an artefact/visualisation/sonification that can be placed in a common space to create peripheral awareness, act as a curiosity object that piques people’s interest, a conversation piece, and something that blends into people’s everyday routine. As an initial site for the installation we imagine our own kitchen at KTH. The project will benefit from a multi-disciplinary design team including skills in coding, design, management/business.

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The future through the present (seminar)

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I went to a seminar at Stockholm University of the Arts earlier today. The topic of the seminar interested me and for some strange reason I had the whole afternoon free so I went on a lark:

The future through the present

Work has an almost religious function in our lives as the most meaningful activity we should devote ourselves to. In the near future, this may be incompatible with new technology that makes work superfluous. Can creative documentaries prepare us for this outcome? Can depictions of the contemporary create projections into the future?

Erik Gandini (professor of documentary film) and Roland Paulsen (sociologist and author) present "The future through the present", an interdisciplinary research project in collaboration with Jyoti Mistry, professor of film at Valand.

"The future of the present" is an interdisciplinary project that combines creative documentary movies and sociology. Erik Gandini discussed a few questions that he as a filmmaker took with him into the project:

- How can a documentary film based on the present and recoded in contemporary times create a projection into something that does not yet exist? A universe of ideas, assumptions, imaginary notions of what yet is not but can be?

- How can a new documentary aesthetic for the future be formulated that is not an imitation of fiction or of the science fiction genre but instead based on the documentary's own narrative element?

The seminar also treated the topics of "work" and "the future of work". Some of the questions that were raised in connection to this were:

- Is the ethical superiority of work (compared to non-work/unemployment etc.) really untouchable?

- Can we think of a different future? Can we imagine what a post-work society look like?

- What will we do when we do not need to work?

- Can creative documentary prepare us for this outcome?

Several other provocative ideas were aired at the seminar, for example:

- A pro-work argument that is repeated all the time is that "we can't afford to work less" (because fewer people will have to work harder, more and longer in order to support more "non-productive" people now and even more so in the future (the young, the old, the infirm, the unemployed, the unemployable illiterate immigrant etc.). Roland Paulsen pointed out that the discussion always seem to glaze over the fact that we have progressively grown wealthier for a very long time.

- Research results indicate that people prefer to work rather than not to work and that it's better to have job than not to have a job taking physical and mental health into consideration. Roland pointed out that these "facts" could be the result of the current "workfare" regime where the alternatives to work (unemployment etc.) have been designed so as to make the alternatives to (full-time) employment unpalatable and punishing.

Erik discussed the phenomena of countries that have become filthy rich (Norway) and showed us footing from an upcoming documentary of his about Kuwait which was very interesting and thought-provoking. All Kuwaiti nationals apparently has the right to get a (well-paid) job - but they don't have  a right to get a meaningful work and many people flounder or suffer as they (sometimes) drag their butts to a workplace where there is nothing to do but to kill time. Erik also mentioned that ultraortodox jews in Israel get a stipend, "a sort of universal basic income", and spend all their time being religions and reading holy texts and apparently also score very high on any and all happiness measures. That's a way of thinking of Israeli ultraortodox jews that I certainly hadn't thought of before...

The seminar also took a for me very unexpected turn when both Roland and Erik at one point started to talk about "counterfactuals" - about worlds that could be (or might have been) as a way to open up our imagination to the currently-unimaginable. I made sure to mention our just-approved research project that starts in January and that involves counterfactuals!

I also learned something new. In psychology, the noble-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has written about about ("upward" and "downward") counterfactuals. I immediately ordered a copy of a 1982 book chapter and an 1986 article of his about counterfactual! In a break, Roland also mentioned to me that the radical marxist sociologist Eric Olin Wright had used/written about counterfactuals, using the term "real utopias". Wright apparently wrote a (for me must-buy) book, "Envisioning real utopias" in 2010 and there is also a "Real Utopias Project" that started more than 25 years ago:

"The Real Utopias Project, begun in 1991, explores a wide range of proposals and models for radical social change. The basic idea is to combine serious normative discussions of the underlying principles and rationales for different emancipatory visions with the analysis of pragmatic problems of institutional design. The project itself consists of a series of conferences sponsored periodically by the A. E, Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin."

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Homo Colossus at Tekniska Museet (application)

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Navet's first call for Small Visionary Projects

In the end of April (four months ago) I wrote a blog post about a medium-sized (1.9 MSEK) research/communication application we handed in. We have submitted yet another application, a "Small Visionary Project" (SVP) proposal that was submitted in response to a call from the new KTH center Navet, "A hub to navigate to unexplored regions between art, technology and design":

"The vision of NAVET is that Sweden should have a leading position in the intersectional area Art, Technology and Design, with a practical and critical approach that stimulates research, innovation, creativity, and the development of a sustainable society."

Navet started up earlier this year with my colleague Roberto Bresin as its first director. One of Navet's first activities was to issue a call for Small Visionary Projects in order to spread (limited amounts of) money and hopefully get some quick results for Navet to show. Even better, the Small Visionary Projects call is supposed to be issued not just once but twice per year! The Navet SVP call stated that:

"Small Visionary Projects (SVPs) are aimed at strengthening the existing networks between the NAVET partner institutions by making possible for researchers to collaborate on joint projects to foster research collaboration and bring added values in areas covered by the institutions, for example by developing and testing new methods and ideas"

The call for Small Visionary Projects was supposed to have been announced in the beginning of May but it did in the end not appear until the beginning of June. This delay meant that the evaluation of the applications had to be postponed. Instead of both submitting and getting notifications before the summer, the new deadline for submitting proposals was changed to August 31 and the date for notifications was changed to September 30.

Mario Romero and me submitted a 0.3 MSEK Navet Small Visionary Project proposal called "Homo Colossus at Tekniska Museet" together with our "regular" partners (Åsa and Per) as well as two persons from Tekniska Museet. The applicants were thus:
- Mario Romero, Associate Professor, KTH
- Daniel Pargman, Associate Professor, KTH
- Åsa Andersson Broms, Senior Lecturer, KKH
- Per Hasselberg, Director of Operations, Konstfrämjandet
- Fanny Söderström Aupeix, Project Leader & Producer, Tekniska Museet
- Åsa Marnell, Head of Exhibitions, Tekniska Museet

The call had some limitation and those that were most important for us were:
- An maximum amount of money you can apply for is 0.3 MSEK (which we did).
- Applications have to involve KTH and a non-KTH partner. There might have been a preference for the three full Navet partners; Royal College of Music (KHM), Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Our partners were instead The Royal Institute of Arts (Kungl. Konsthögskolan) and the Technical museum in Stockholm and this might have disadvantaged our application since the call states that "The applicants should, at the moment of the submission, specify which of the NAVET partner institutions [...] will be involved in the proposed project".
- Confusingly, the brunt of the money you apply for can only be used to pay for the time/salary of KTH personnel, so while it is necessary to apply together with a non-KTH partner, that partner has to bear their own costs (e.g. someone's time/salary). I assume this is a requirement from KTH, but it's still a bit strange and makes for awkward conversations with your project partner(s).
- The application is just 1 page long! Director Roberto Bresin has said that ”he has better things to do with his time” than to read long applications.
- The projects are both small and lithe/quick. They are to run and be finished in just 6 months.

My colleague Mario Romero was the main applicant and our application specified that we would use a sliver of money to pay for Mario's and my time (2% each) and another sliver of money will pay for some technical equipment (high-end smartphones). Most of the money we applied for is to be used to pay the salary of a research engineer (a skilful student) for 50% of his/her time during a period of 5 months. As part of the "Aim of this project" we specified that:

"The main aim of the project is divided into three phases. First, we aim to collect and analyze direct non-participant observation data at Tekniska Museet of a working prototype of the AR application that our students developed last autumn. Second, with the analysis of this usage data, we aim to improve the design of the AR application and its integration into the museum environment. Our goal is to design and develop the next version of the application together with our collaborators who are artists and museum curators. Third, we aim to deploy an improved and contextualized version of the application at Tekniska Museet, collect and analyze observation data and write a report that will both inform Navet and may serve as both material to be part of a future scientific publication and data to serve as evidence and seed to the next round of applying for funding from various research grant agencies.

The research questions of the deployment of the application will include: 
- What is the public perception of energy consumption before and after the exhibit? 
- How do people explore and acquire an understanding of energy consumption and how does this new understanding help them reflect upon and impact their lifestyles? 
- How do people perceive and understand energy consumption patterns across time and place? 
- How do people understand the relationships between energy consumption and carbon emissions, environmental impact, and sustainable lifestyles? 
- In particular, we will test the affordances of AR in a museum environment towards addressing the issues listed here."

Our "Justification of budget and involved personnel" outlines how we will use the money we applied for:

"Mario Romero and Daniel Pargman will supervise the technical and scientific qualities of the research while one or more research engineers (equivalent to 5 months at 50%) will develop and test the software and gather experimental data for reporting the results of the installation. Finally, to develop and test the software, we need to acquire at least two high-end smartphones."

Comment: This blog post was written at a later point in time and has been back-dated. 

Addendum: We were supposed to know if our application was approved by October 1 but only on October 25 did we get an official notice. In the end, 6 out of 15 applications were funded and ours was not one of them. There has, to the best of my knowledge, been zero information published about what applications/projects have been approved. The three reviewers gave our application a paltry 2.7 out of 5 on each of the three criteria, "Aim of this project", "Strategic importance and impact" and "Future plan". It could also be that our applications was disadvantaged or severely disadvantaged because one of the reviewers wrote that "A collaboration between KTH, KKH and Tekniska Museet (does this qualify under the conditions of Navet’s SVP – are there enough Navet partner institutions involved?) [...] Unlike other application [...] there are questions regarding the number of Navet collaborative partners involved". That was definitely a let-down. It would have been good to know in advance if our application was disqualified and we would obviously not have spent time writing it  but I'm still unsure if that's the case or not. I'm also unsure whether we will bother to apply for a Small Visionary Project again (the next call is supposed to be announced in February 2020 but there is (again) zero information on the Navet homepage so it's a bit unclear. 

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Narrative science (workshop)

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I was invited to give a talk at a two-day workshop that was organised by the European Research Council (ERC-funded) project “Narrative Science”. The principal workshop organisers were Mary S. Morgan (principal investigator) and Andrew Hopkins.

The topic of the workshop was "Does time always pass? Temporalities in scientific narratives" and the research project has apparently organised many such workshop; the previous workshop was "Narratives as navigational tools" (March 2019) and the next two workshops are "Scientific polyphony: How scientific narratives configure many 'voices'" (June 2019) and "Narrative science in techno-environments" (July 2019). From what I understand, Mary has hired a number of post-docs in the project and then help plan but mainly let them organise and run workshops that are in line with their and the project's research interests.

In Andrew's invitation (March), he wrote that "This will be an interdisciplinary event that will include an interesting mix of contributions from fields including philosophy, history of science, geology, biology, cosmology and others, to explore how narratives about and involving time occur in various disciplines." The reason I was invited to give a talk is of course because of our 2017 article "What if there had only been half the oil? Rewriting history to envision the consequences of peak oil".

While the workshop encompassed a broad mix of people and topics, it still felt that I was one of the more exotic additions to the workshop both due to my "odd" background (computer science, social science and sustainability) and the "odd" topic of my talk (allohistorical narratives/counterfactuals). Most people who attended the workshop were philosophers or historians and more specifically people with backgrounds in philosophy of science or history of science. Literature was also very much present in the form of a few participants with such backgrounds, through the theories that participants referred to and of course through the project itself ("narrative science"). A few of the titles of talks that were given at the workshop were "Faraday's Lines of Force and the Temporality of Serial Narration", Do we always need a timeline? The roles of temporal sequence in art narratives and science narratives", "Narratives in scientific argument and explanation" and "When you can't get there from here: The importance of temporal order in evolutionary biology and ecology" If you want to know/learn more, do have a look at the narrative science project website and at the 2017 special issue about "Narrative in Science" in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

My workshop talk was entitled "Using allohistorical narratives to envision alternative energy futures” and here's my abstract:

Everything unsustainable is possible only until it isn’t any longer. Our use of non-renewable fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) is unsustainable but has for centuries increased both in relative and absolute terms and currently constitutes 85% of the global energy supply. We intuitively sense that the consequences of phasing out fossil fuels will be momentous, but it is hard to envision what the transition to alternative energy sources could look like since "prediction is hard, especially about the future”. We suggest that allohistorical (counterfactual) narratives can be used for that purpose and we explore a specific scenario in our 2017 paper "What if there had only been half the oil? Rewriting history to envision the consequences of peak oil”, the first in a planned series of papers about ”Coalworld”. 

At the workshop I felt like I was the "practitioner" who used (counterfactual) narratives for a very specific purpose. Almost everyone else was a "theoretician" and their talks were sprinkled with terms such as "narrative processing", "reason-giving practices", "serial narration", "narrative closure", "discursive practices", "narrative explanation" and many more such terms. Interestingly enough, someone mentioned that my talk was the only talk that concerned (also) the future at this workshop on time and scientific narratives. Most other speakers talked about and analysed historical persons and historical events, including for example competing hypotheses/narratives about "the nature of contemporary theories in evolutionary biology employed to explain the origin of eukaryotic cells" (a very long theory ago). I instead discussed the story in the paper we have written as well as the story of the paper. The latter included both the history of the paper and even further back, the motivation behind the paper as well as the future of the paper - since our paper is the first "instalment" in a planned series of papers.

My talk got a very positive reception and there were many interesting questions from the audience. Some questions were relatively easy to answer and others will leave me pondering for quite some time. It was perhaps a pity that my talk was number 11 out of 14 talks, I think I would have gotten more feedback and more out of the workshop had I presented during the first day. 

An amusing and quite embarrassing event happened when I, during a coffee break the first day, was involved in a conversation with a professor and a post-doc and the post-doc asked me what I thought of "Lewis". It turned out that there's this philosopher, David K. Lewis, who wrote the book about counterfactuals back in 1973. The title of the book is "Counterfactuals". I helped organise a week-long international workshop on counterfactuals earlier this year but none of the 20+ participants mentioned this book at any time during that week... My explanation for how this could be is that it seems that people from many different academic disciplines seems to have thought and written about counterfactuals, but I've never really met or discussed the topic with philosophers before... Also, someone else said the book was actually "boring" and that I should instead settle for reading Lewis' much shorter 1979 text "Counterfactual dependence and time's arrow" (pdf file).

All in all it was a nice workshop and I made a few new contacts that I believe I will be in contact with later! The workshop was organised by The London School of Economics but it was hosted by the Royal Institution. Here's some more background info about the workshop:

TEMPORALITIES IN SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES

The standard view of narrative is inextricably bound up with the passage of time. Narrative scholars are convinced that time is an essential element in any narrative, and it has been thought equally essential, though treated in different ways, by philosophers of history. But exactly how to think about time in the narratives of science is not self-evident. And if we look at the way scientists use time in narratives, we see a number of different ways in which time is taken into account and is deployed. Time may be an element in the way scientists write and tell about their handling of materials, processes, practices and discoveries. Alternatively, it may feature as an element in their accounts of causes, mechanisms, interactions, and developments in their scientific materials. And it may be an important component in their theoretical and conceptual terms and discussions. Thus, there are many different sites and guises in which scientists use time in their own subject-based narratives.

In this workshop, the focus will be on the different temporalities in narratives as they occur in scientific discourses. The obvious loci for such explorations are what are generally referred to as the historical sciences, that is, those that seek to reconstruct the past, which may be very deep, on the basis of what can be observed in the present. These include geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology, cosmology and forensic science. Beyond the obvious disciplines however, time and its narrative expression are to be found in a wide variety of places, from measuring the arrival of seismic waves travelling through the earth, to the account of the lab scientist patiently waiting for a key change to occur in an experiment. Other ways of tracing time in scientific narratives might look to the “what if” questions posed in counterfactual reasoning; the ways time is rethought over a life- time; allegiances and resistances to time-based identities; and the relations of narrative to memory and myth. Throughout the workshop, the question of how essential time is to narrative will remain open for argument.

We suggest three starting points in this wide agenda:

1. Perspectival matters - does a scientist’s narrative look forward to what will happen, or backward over what has happened, or for a dynamics involving time within those materials or do they rather try to get a bird’s eye synoptic view, or look sideways at points in a chain where time just pass by on the other side? And, are the phenomena scientists study reversible, or is time itself only ever uni-directional?

2. Routine matters - does a scientist regularly observe their materials at a specific point in time, observe at the beginning and end of some event, or try to capture the moving process of a phenomena? And equally, do narrative representations of their phenomena repeat certain intervals, or work to different rhythms and rulers.

3. Time matters - Does time really or always matter in a science narrative. Is it instead a place holder for something else that is substantive (such as development, a change process, or a regularity), or else not really very important in terms of the coherence and credibility of a narrative where other ‘rulers’, such as spatial or subject- relations, rule? Does time structure a scientist’s narrative or does the narrative provide the argument, structure or logic in which time appears?

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From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus (application)

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Project partners in our Formas Communication application, 

"From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus: Visualising our energy footprint"

Half a year ago I wrote a blog post about the fact that we received seed money from KTH (80.000 SEK) for a small sustainability-related project, "Homo Colossus In Real Life" (HC-IRL). The idea was that the money would be spent on a fact-finding mission with me doing the heavy lifting:

"I will personally do the major part of the work in the project [and] the other three members of the project (Mario Romero, Per Hasselberg and Åsa Andersson Broms) will function as a reference group/steering committee for the project (e.g. for me). We will meet regularly (once per month?) during 2019 and I will work with small fact-finding missions in-between these meetings."

This hasn't really happed yet. The four people who are engaged in the project have instead met regularly and talked and planned what will or what should happen in the project "later".

That has all changed as of lately. I got a tip from a colleague about a grant from the funding agency Formas. It is interestingly not a call for research projects but rather a "Communication Call" - a call for communication projects. Formas does not distribute a huge amount of money through this call (as research grant calls go), but they do fund smaller and medium-sized projects that "communicate and popularize research and research results about sustainable development".

It is not very strange that it's a requirement that each application/project has a project manager but it is definitely more unusual that "One of the project participants must have a degree or training in communication or equivalent experience [and] At least one researcher with a doctoral degree must be part of the project team". The call is also different fram and a lot freer than ordinary research grants since "Different types of communication projects may qualify for funding, including popular science seminars, publications, games, exhibitions, video productions, digital productions, or other popular science activities that communicate sustainability research."

To apply, we needed to expand our science + art project into a science + art + communications project and find a bona fide communications person who could join us. I have to that end recruited the excellent Belinda Hellberg to be part of the application besides the two researchers (me, Mario) and the two artists (Per, Åsa). I have known Belinda for 10 years or so but we have never worked together before. I have however previously invited her to give guest lectures in my sustainability course and also to be part of our concluding panel debate in that course.


Despite the fact that the text in the application itself is relatively short (9000 characters), we have spent a substantial amount of time during the last month "projectifying" our ideas about Homo Colossus in order to shape them into a three-year project that we would like to work on and that we think would be of interest to Formas to fund. Our project is called "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus: Visualising our energy footprint" and we have also managed to recruited a bunch of interesting project partners (see the image above). Despite the fact that we have applied for the maximum amount of money that is possible (1.9 MSEK), that turns out not to be very much when it should last for three years and be divided between five persons. Our ambitious project just can't be accomplished if not for the fact that me and Mario have the possibility to recruit bachelor's and master's students every spring who will write their theses while working in/for this project. We think we can do that and we have also set aside enough money to pay some of these students to spend time working on the outcomes of their master's thesis projects so that the results can become more useful for us/the communications project. I think we can make this work and the project itself is super exciting. Here's the popular 2000-character summary of the project:

"This application proposes a four-step communication strategy to convey an understanding, both public and personal, of the energy footprint of Swedes from different walks of life. First, KTH, KKH and The City of Stockholm will investigate where to place a number of art installations in the city. Second, the project will create and release a smartphone augmented reality application to interactively enhance the physical art installations. Third, the collaborators will produce and distribute a publicity campaign over social media and other popular channels aimed at engaging the general public with the installations and the mobile app. Finally, in collaboration with Tekniska Museet, the project will curate a temporary exhibit at the museum, allowing its audience to explore the issues of energy footprints further.

The art installation will convey the concept of typical Swedes’ energy footprints through a thought experiment. The starting point is that the bigger you are, the more you need to eat. But what if we included not just calories from the food we eat, but all the energy we “consume” in our daily lives, such as the fuel that powers our vehicles, the hot water that heats our homes and the electricity that illuminates our cities and powers the Internet? How big would we be? Through careful models, we calculate that the average Swede would weigh 20 000 Kilos, or three times more than the largest elephant!

The idea of us being as big as our energy footprint is called Homo Colossus. The project aims to convey it through art, augmented reality, and a museum exhibit and by interactively visualizing the energy size of Swedes from all walks of life; from the poor single mother who struggles to make ends meet to the executive who flies several times per week. What do we look like through the lens of our energy footprints? We invite curious minds of all ages to explore this question through our public, interactive, artistic, technical installations."

The application itself had to describe the project through three different lenses (with at the most 3000 characters for each of the three parts): 1) societal relevance and research quality of the project, 2) communication activities, target groups and communication channel and 3) communication plan and competence. I choose to reproduce the last part below as it specifies what it actually is we will do during the next three years, should we get the money we have applied for:

"This application brings together unique competence in the form of research (Pargman, Romero), artistic (Andersson Broms, Hasselberg) and communication expertise (Hellberg) in a project that combines sustainability research, scientific visualisation and artistic/aesthetic expression. The project group has an even gender balance. The project utilises a number of innovative solutions to communicate knowledge about sustainability research through public art, Augmented Reality (AR) and a museum exhibition.

The project communication officer, applicant Hellberg, will manage project communication channels. This includes information dissemination, e.g. creation and management of a project web page, PR, press releases and contacts with journalists and the sustainability and art community during year 3. Communication channels also include “engagement”, e.g. creating Facebook and Instagram project accounts and regularly posting content there during year 3 (See Appendix 2 for further information about the communication plan).

The project can be divided into three phases:

• Year 1: Research & Development. ​Research on how to adapt/represent the Homo Colossus concept through a pool of personas. Development of the AR infrastructure.
• Year 2: Testing & Adaptation. ​Small-scale testing, evaluation and redesign of AR, adaptation of AR experience to artistic/aesthetic sensibilities, building sculptures.
• Year 3: Roll-out. ​Deployment of sculptures and release of AR app, scale-up of communication activities, museum exhibition and large-scale longitudinal evaluation of deployment.

The project will work closely with three different 5th-year courses at the computer science and at the media technology engineering programmes at KTH: Advanced Graphics and Interaction and Advanced Project Course in Interactive Media Technology (each autumn) and the Degree Project (master’s thesis) in Computer Science and Communication, specializing in Interactive Media Technology (each spring).

This project will afford opportunities to further KTH students’ education through performing original research in advanced project courses and in the subsequent master’s theses. Applicants Pargman and Romero will make sure that one or two project groups will work with project-related questions in each (autumn) project course and will then recruit talented students to do their master’s thesis in the project (spring). Students who perform excellent thesis work will be offered the opportunity to continue to work in the project over the summer or during the following autumn (salaried by the project). KTH students will also work together with Andersson Broms’ students at the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. Konsthögskolan) in their one-year course Materialities where students (who are active artists) explore computer visualization, 3D techniques, Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality, moving images, soundscapes, photogrammetry, projection mapping, photography etc."


Comment: This blog post was written at a later point in time and has been back-dated.

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The cloud devours electricity (radio interview)

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I was on Swedish radio yesterday, in the weekly science/sustainability show "Klotet"(The Globe). The theme of this episode was The cloud devours electricity - can we store data sustainably? ("Molnet slukar el - går det att lagra data hållbart?"). The show was built up around two pre-recoded reportages and they also had two invited guests who commented and discussed the intersection of on the one hand computing and social media use and on the other hand sustainability. Besides me, the other guest was professor of Communication Systems Erik Agrell from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. I had to go to Uppsala to record the show so it took half a day (plus preparations!). The chat/interview with me and Erik took an hour but was later cut down to 20 minutes or so.

Sustainability in this context primarily means energy use and related carbon emissions, but it could also include material throughput (us buying and throwing away gadgets or data centers buying and throwing away servers). I took the partly unspecific and unstructured questions I got sent over by mail beforehand and structured them a bit so here's what they wanted us to comment/talk about:

- On the electricity consumption of data traffic in relation to sustainability:
   - Is this a big problem now and/or in the future? If so, how do we solve it?
   - Do people need to change their behaviour (just as we need to change how we transport ourselves etc.)?
   - How far can (future) technical developments take us?

It just so happens that I am giving a ph.d. course this term (together with my colleague Miriam Börjesson Rivera) and several of these questions relate to issues we discussed at the previous seminar or that we will discuss at the next seminar. So I prepared by leafing through paper I had just read and by reading papers we will discuss at our upcoming seminar so that was pretty convenient.

I knew that the focus of both the radio program and that of Erik Agrell would be on technical challenges in terms of how much the data traffic grows each year (≈ 25%), how much global electricity generation grows each year (≈ 3%), how much technical developments on energy efficiency might counteract such trends etc., so I decided to try to open up the discussion to take into account also other factors instead of focusing only on such technical factors (which are not my forte). This part of my argument primarily builds on the arguments made in this 2016 paper:

Preist, C., Schien, D., & Blevis, E. (2016). Understanding and mitigating the effects of device and cloud service design decisions on the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1324-1337). ACM.

Priest et al. talks about "the cornucopian paradigm" where:
1) "Effectively, the provision of digital services to high-end users stimulates latent demand in mainstream users for such services".
2) "The mainstream users then pick up devices and services which were formerly high-end, and they become embedded in everyday practice. Services that most users were happy without become essential to everyday life for the majority of the populace in developed countries."
3) "This results in a reinforcing feedback loop encouraging growth of the digital infrastructure."

A growing digital infrastructure then enables the design of new high-end services that later/again makes increased demands on infrastructure (and so on). This is succinctly summarised by an image in their paper:

The paper also has a long list of design principles that drives the increase in infrastructure demand that I found useful when I exemplified and pretended that I used a GoPro camera to record the daily commute to my job. Such a video stream could be automatically backed up to the cloud and I might also make "unreasonable" demands at a later point in time, for example assuming that I will have instant access to this video stream and can choose to share it a year later when I'm on vacation in Antarctica (filmed in high-definition video of course).

Basically I wanted to emphasise that the infrastructure does not grow autonomously but rather because new technical possibilities (increased storage, increased bandwidth, new capabilities and features in the electronic gadgets we buy and in the software that runs them) creates the possibilities for developing new high-end data-intensive services and because we as users are quick to pick up those services and incorporate them into our behaviours and into our lives. This line of reasoning problematises and opens up discussions about our behaviour. Are there limits to our needs (or our "needs", e.g. wants)? We only have 24 hours per day, but we can replace less data-intensive practices with more data-intensive practices, including but not limited to using more than one device/service simultaneously.

This line of reasoning analyses the problem, but a second article starts the discussion about what to do to "solve" this problem. That article is written by Kelly Widdicks and me and it's currently in review. It's a kind of continuation of an article we wrote together a bit more than a year ago, "Undesigning the Internet: An exploratory study of reducing everyday Internet connectivity". That paper was written together with yet three more persons and it was presented at the Fifth International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) in Toronto a bit less than a year ago. The new, just-submitted article that we are writing, "Breaking the Cornucopian Paradigm: Towards Moderate Internet Use in Everyday Life" has just been submitted to this year's (upcoming) workshop on Computing within Limits. Borrowing from another area, here then is the line of reasoning I made in the radio show:

We should all switch to buying ecological food, but it costs more so many people don't. It could however be the case that many buy ecological food not in order to "save the environment" but because they believe it is more healthy for themselves and because they care about their children's health. So these two motivations pull in the same direction and it might be that the latter (health) has more pull than the former (sustainability).

It might similarly be an uphill battle to try to convince people to use their phones less in order to "save the environment", but there might exist strong non-sustainbility reasons for why we should think about tempering our use of electronic gadgets and these drivers could also have beneficial effects in terms of sustainability - so we should explore which they are. We have four examples (reasons) in the paper but I'll just mention one here and that is "Relationships". It might be beneficial for our close relationships if we put our phones/gadgets away more often; We might ban them from the second floor in the house (where our bedrooms are) or from the dinner table (to encourage unmediated face to face conversations). Some schools have "smartphone hotels" where you park your phone, perhaps we should have smartphone hotels also in our homes? Perhaps "parental controls" should be extended to cover the whole family's use of electronic gadgets in the home?

I also cursorily raised the questions of etiquette in the radio show. There are etiquette rules in many different areas of life but few around our use of electronic gadgets. Perhaps we should speed up the invention of such rules? For a fascinating take on the evolution of etiquette, do see my blog post about Norbert Elias' (1939) book "The Civilizing Process",  a book that in detail analyses the evolution of etiquette rules over centuries (do also look the quotes further down in that blog post).

All in all it was fun to be on radio. I also thought a bit about what I could have done different so that my next appearance on radio will be better. Lastly I also suggested two other topics for radio shows so don't be surprised if I write a new blog post about my next appearance on radio a year or so from now.
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Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations (application)

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I just submitted a research grant application, "Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice", to the Swedish Energy Agency in response to their call "Contribute to the creation of a transport efficient society".

The application is written together with my colleagues Elina Eriksson, Björn Hedin and Jarmo Laaksolahti but it is also written with our new collaborator Markus Robért who works at the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment. We got a tip-off some time ago to get in touch with Markus through Göran Finnveden who is vice-president for sustainable development at KTH, and, our collaboration with Markus has great promise. This application builds on work Markus has pursued for more than a decade, but it takes his work in a direction that he himself might not have thought of. Also, Markus is just one person but now he gets help from four others to take "his" research to the next level. To us, it's instead a great opportunity to explore an area we are interested in by cooperating with and building on work that someone else has already done for more than a decade.

The application has an abstract and while the abstract is correct, it does not really succeed in capturing what we feel are the most exiting and interesting aspects of this project:

Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice

In flight-intensive organizations, many employees travel both frequently and far - resulting in large CO2 emissions. At management level, there is often an awareness and a willingness to change, as expressed for example through internal climate goals. But at those levels in the organization where concrete decisions are made about when, where and how to travel, there is a lack of awareness and tools to manage these challenges. In this project, we will create and test practical tools to reduce travel-related CO2 emissions, thereby moving from words to action. By using a structured method in combination with analog and digital tools, the project will take stock, visualize, design, plan and mediate negotiations about departmental and individual CO2 emissions and the results will be followed up regularly. The project aims to give flight-intensive organizations greater opportunities to reach or exceed climate targets, thereby contributing to an energy-efficient and sustainable future.

Markus has developed a process management tool called CERO that is used to track and help organisations reach their emission targets (typically to reduce their emissions by 10-20% in a few short years). CERO is being implemented in a large and growing number of companies as well as in Swedish municipalities, counties and regions. One organisation that Markus works with is in fact KTH and he therefor has massive amounts of data about our travel and carbon emissions (delivered directly from our travel agency). KTH the goal of reducing its CO2 emissions by 20% between 2016 and 2020 and has contracted Markus/CERO to help make that happen. KTH is a tough case though as almost all (90+%) of our CO2 emissions from travel comes from flying. While Markus currently works with a top-down process, it's very hard for KTH centrally to have a say in the travel habits of different departments and individual researchers - and that's where our application enters the picture:

We will in this project use a CO2 currency and a workshop methodology to reach departments and individual researchers and encourage them to reflect on how they should proceed in order to reduce their travel emissions - without compromising the quality of their research.
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Our process will make it possible for individuals to place their own travel in a larger context and it also focuses on equality and justice by implicitly or explicitly asking questions of the type "Who flies?", "How much?", "Who will reduce his/her flying?" and "How can this happen?".

There are several things that are neat about this application. One of them is that Markus runs an annual symposium for the 80-ish organisations that currently uses CERO. It's a lot of work for him to organise the symposium alone, but we can help him out and this project would of course be part of the program during the three years that it would run. Another neat thing is that besides presenting the results of the project in (open access) journal articles, we have pledged to only present the results at conferences that we can attend without flying there. That's a first for me and it basically means that we will only present it in Europe (and preferably mid- to northern Europe at that).

If there ever was an application where it felt like we hit all the marks, well, then this is it. We were definitely on a high as we handed in the application. The Energy Agency will hand out funds for at least 10 projects and we have so much faith in our application that we were confident there just can't be 10 other applications that are better than our. We hope.
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The Future of Computing and Wisdom (article)

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I wrote a blog post some time ago about a workshop we organised at the NordiCHI 2018 conference (Oslo, end of September), "The Futures of Computing and Wisdom". Quick recap:
- The organisers were Daniel Pargman, Elina Eriksson, Rob Comber, Ben Kirman and Oliver Bates.
- The participants did not know it beforehand, but the workshop was set up so as to generate material for a journal article.
- The planned article was to be submitted to one of three special 50th anniversary issues of the journal Futures (theme: "Wise Futures").

Well guess what, I submitted that article, "The Future of Computing and Wisdom: Insights from Human-Computer Interaction" through publisher Elseiver's clunky submission system just a few short hours before the deadline on December 31, 2018 (happy new year!). On the way - between the workshop and the finished article - we picked up two additional co-authors who attended the workshop and who were interested in contributing and the finished article. Here are the authors of the just-submitted article:
- Daniel Sapiens Pargman, K​TH Royal Institute of Technology
- Elina Eriksson KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Oliver Bates Lancaster University
- Ben Kirman, University of York
- Rob Comber, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Anders Hedman, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Martijn van den Broeck, Umeå Institute of Design

Our article breaks some of the conventions for scientific articles since this is what the Call for Paper asked for/specified:
- This call invites reports from collaborative dialogues on responsible futures. In this case, the dialogues should attempt to articulate normative futures in 2068; what futures should humanity strive for?
- The call [...] invites reports of dialogues on the futures of wisdom, i.e. what might be considered responsible and wise in 2068, and why [emphasis in the original call].
- The main outputs to be published in this theme are structured reports on conversations. These will be edited accounts of dialogues between people.
- For these dialogical contributions rapporteurs will be the corresponding author of reports. Significant contributors to the particular dialogue (e.g. 20% or more) can be named as joint authors. 

So papers for this special issue have "rapporteurs" rather than "authors" and the main contribution of these papers isn't that they report on an experiment or provide a sharp analysis of some social phenomenon, but rather that they constitute a "structured reports of conversations" about the futures of wisdom. This presented us with a challenge as none of us (naturally) had written such report before. A paragraph in the call gave some hints about this new genre ("structured reports of conversations") and what was expected from us:

Dialogue contributions
The aim is to produce a series of dialogues that are well-informed and well-reasoned, rather than rhetorical polemic with single dominant voices. Dialogues should be explorative of normative images of 2068, recognise points of agreement and recognise points of difference. We do not seek consensus, nor battles to be won. As with all publications in Futures they should contribute new knowledge to our understanding of the future and our relationships with the future. Thus clarity of ideas and reasoning and contribution to knowledge will be the main acceptance and editorial criteria. Diversity of participants and imaginaries is encouraged to offer voices to those who, in the language of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, will be ‘left behind’. Unlike more traditional academic papers, discussions of a range of extant literature and methodologies etc. are not required, except in as much as they form part of the context setting and explicit argumentation in the dialogue.

With this in mind, we wrote a paper that presents the main tool we used at the workshop to critically  think about the future, namely fictional abstracts or "abstracts of yet-to-be-written research papers that will be published in 2068". Each workshop participant wrote a fiction abstract and they together discussed various aspects of future wisdom in the context of computing and all nine fictional abstracts are available here. The results part of our paper builds on our workshop discussions and presents our thoughts on a number of themes "that have been extracted both from the workshop discussions as well as from the fictional abstracts themselves". These themes are:
- What is wisdom?
- Where is wisdom, and how do we build and transfer it?
- Human++ [about enhanced humans]
- Time and Acceleration
- Beware and Rejoice futures [what we hope for and what we fear]

All in all a fun special issue and a fun project. I finish this blog post with the abstract of our paper:

The Future of Computing and Wisdom: Insights from Human-Computer Interaction
In this paper, we present a structured report on a dialogue on the Future of Computing and Wisdom. The dialogue consists of a recorded and transcribed discussion between researchers and practitioners in the field of Human-Computer Interaction that was held at a workshop in conjunction with the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in September 2018. However, the dialogue also encompasses workshop participants’ preparatory work with writing “fictional abstracts” - abstracts of yet-to-be-written research papers that will be published in 2068. The polyvocal dialogue that is reported upon thus includes not just the voices of researchers and practitioners who attended the workshop, but also includes the voices of the future researchers of 2068 who wrote the abstracts in question as well as the voices of the organisms, individuals, intelligent agents and communities who are the subjects, victims, beneficiaries and bystanders of wise (or unwise) future computing systems.
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