Man is a dinosaur (popular article)

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Man is a dinosaur

KTH just published a (Swedish-language) popular science text about our brand new science + art + communications project, "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus” (here's my previous blog post about that project). The article is right there on KTH's front page and it is called "Människan är en dinosaurie” ["Man is a dinosaur"].

In what way are we dinosaurs? We are dinosaurs because we (Swedes) consume as much much energy in our everyday lives as a 30-ton dinosaur needed to fuel its body from one day to the next. I had earlier routinely used the number 20 tons. I cannot remember any longer exactly where that number came from, but counting embedded energy (the energy needed to manufacture the stuff - elsewhere - that we consume in Sweden), I now believe it comes down to closer to 30 tons than 20 tons on average.

One thing I have realised I liked less with this article is the way it came to be. The journalist/communicator who works for KTH never spoke to me in person nor on the phone. Instead he mailed a bunch of questions and I foolishly spent quite a lot of time answering them - so it feels like I did at least half of his job. It would have been easier and more enjoyable for me if we had had a chat for half an hour and he would have created an article based on that interview and I have decided that I will never again accept this type of arrangement. I'm not a journalist and I shouldn't do the journalist's job (nor am I paid to do the job of journalists). The text itself is good though and I believe the journalist did a good job of taking the text I wrote and making an article of it.
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2019 - the year MID4S levelled up

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2019 was the year when our "sustainability team" (MID4S) levelled up and became a real "research group". We pulled in tens of millions of SEK in research grants and we now manage more than half a dozen different research projects. We will also hire at least three new PhDs/post-docs during the first half of 2020, so much has happened since last year. This is a personal summary of 2019 from the point of view of the MID4S team and it consists of two parts:
1) the history of the sustainability team as recreated through contents of this blog and
2) a short summary of the most important things that have happened to the MID4S team during 2019

History of the MID for Sustainability (MID4S) team

I have searched for the history of our sustainability team, MID4S, on this blog. The earliest blog post with the term "MID4S" in the title, "MID4S - MID for sustainability" was published six years ago (December 2013). MID is of course the name of our department (Media Technology and Interaction Design) and in that blog post from six years ago:
- I commented that the team has existed for 1.5 years but that we hadn't really had a name up until the end of 2013. It was apparently Teo Enlund who coined the name of the team - MID for Sustainability (MID4S).
- I was proud of the fact that the team had written three papers about sustainability and ICT (our first papers!) and that we had submitted two research grant applications (of which one had just been approved).
- We had, at the time, just had our second team kick-off.
- With a new name for the group, we moved our blog to a new, easier-to-remember address: mid4s.wordpress.com which we will still use.
- We decided that we would write a proposal for organising a workshop about sustainability at the then-upcoming NordiCHI 2014 conference in Helsinki (which me and Elina did).
- We had also decided to write a position paper for the sustainability workshop at the upcoming CHI 2014 conference in Toronto (which me, Elina and Åke Walldius also did).
- We decided that we should write bachelor's and master's thesis proposals and that our team should be able to supervise students working on sustainability-related topics each term.
- On a personal level, I had just announced on the blog (Nov 2013) that I was going to UC Irvine on a sabbatical for half a year during the first half of 2014.
- We also did an exercise where each team member thought about where he/she wanted to be/do/have done as an individual and as team 1, 2 and 5 years from now.

I actually found a google document from that kick-off, "MID4S Vision", which, in eight bullets (plus an additional bullet that was added two years later), states where we as a group wanted to be five years later. It's fair to say that we have accomplished the majority of everything on the list, but that it took six years rather than five.

If I go back even further, I published a blog post in December 2012 about our first team kick-off:
- Nine out of 21 team members (on our distribution list) attended the kick-off "to discuss past and future activities of the team". Of those nine team members who showed up, four still remain at the department; me, Elina Eriksson, Cristian Bogdan and Anders Lundström.
- At that meeting we decided to switch from having semi-weekly Monday morning meetings to semi-weekly Tuesday lunch meetings - which we still do!

The very first blog post about the team was however written in February 2012 - almost 8 years ago (!). That blog post was written at a time when the sustainability team kind of hadn't really formed. Apparently we had only met three or four times when the summer of 2012 came around. So much for the history; now we fast-forward to the very successes year of of 2019.

2019 - the year MID4S levelled up

I will here refrain from enumerating things we have done during 2019 that we have done also during the previous years (e.g. organise workshops, attend conferences, write academic papers etc.). I will instead focus on what was significant (and different) in 2019 compared to earlier years.

The most fundamental difference between 2019 and earlier years is that we have, in fact, written significantly fewer academic papers this year because we have instead spent our time writing a very large number of research grant applications: We have altogether been part of no less than 20 research grant applications during 2019! Of those applications:
- two were handed in late during the year and are still being processed. They might be approved or they might be rejected and we don't yet know anything.
- four applications were not written by MID4S team members and we claim only a minor part of the money that is being asked for in these application. Two of these applications were rejected and two have been approved.

Of the remaining 14 applications that our team handed in, no less than 7 were approved - that's a smashing 50% of the applications we wrote and that number is phenomenal! We definitely seem to have "cracked" the code for shaping successful project ideas and for writing successful research grant applications. Almost all of the MID4S team's 14 applications were written by either Daniel Pargman, Cecilia Katzeff, Björn Hedin or Elina Eriksson - we basically wrote three applications each. One additional applications was written by our colleague Olle Bälter and one (huge) applications was written by Elina Eriksson together with Rob Comber. We did unfortunately not get funding for any of those two applications.

Me and Cecilia Katzeff have on the other hand been extremely fortunate. We handed in three research grant applications each and all six applications were approved! I don't have access to the budget for all applications, but my three applications together have an aggregated budget of more than 13 MSEK and I believe that all our 7+2 approved MID4S applications pulled in around 30 MSEK during 2019. That does not include the additional money from successful applications that were approved in 2018 - for research projects that are currently ongoing (another 14 MSEK or so).

To summarise; from feeling the pressure to pull in money to decrease our teaching load and to also spend our time doing research, we are currently, well, bathing in money. The rapid influx of money has in itself created (luxury) "problems" for us, or rather "bottle-necks" that we are currently trying to find solutions to. One challenge is that all our projects more or less end at the same time (in 2022) - but we have a few years to fix this and work out the kinks. Another challenge is that some of us are currently overbooked. It's probably the case that I am the most extreme. I am supposed to always teach at least 50% of my time. My department also pays 20% of my salary so that I can do "free research" (for example writing research grant applications). I was supposed to work 20% in one of Björn Hedin's projects. I was also supposed to be project leader and work 30% each in two of my approved projects and another 10% in the third project. That turns out to be 160% of a full-time job which unsurprisingly is way too much. The first thing that happened after several projects had been approved was that I cancelled my involvement in Björn's project (20% of my time) - and Björn cancelled his involvement in my project (20% of his time). This "liberated" money and another huge change compared to earlier years is that we now have the funds to hire no less than three PhD's and/or post-docs in our new research projects during the first half of 2020. We have already hired the first PhD (in one of my projects) and he (Aksel) will start to work at KTH a month from now - I will write a separate blog post about that later.

All our major ongoing research projects are listed on this webpage, but several new projects that will start in 2020 have not yet been added to the page.

All in all + to summarise:

- 2019 was the year when our research team levelled up and became a research group
- We are now running a bunch of research projects and several new will start in 2020
- We have come into serious money and will hire (at least) three new colleagues (PhDs/post-docs) during the first half of 2020.

2019 was thus a great year for our research group. I believe that many things changed on a fundamental level and that things will not be the same for me and my colleagues from now on. It's also exceedingly hard to imagine that things will go back to they way they were before.

We had a meeting the very last day before the Christmas break and discussed the very large number of upcoming research grant calls that are on our radar, so as to discuss which we should aim for. Due to our recent success and due to the fact that many of use are fully funded research-wise for several years ahead, we have decided that we have to restrict our research-grant-writing activities to projects that can seamlessly latch on to projects and activities that we are already doing. Despite this, we have decided to ourselves write or be part of either five or six new research grant applications between January - March 2020.
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Homo Colossus at World Expo 2020!

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Mattias Hansson, Program Director in the Committee for Sweden's Participation at Expo 2020 (front/middle) and the The Homo Colossus project team; Åsa Andersson Broms, Belinda Retourné, Daniel Pargman, Per Hasselberg and Mario Romero. 

I recently (less than two weeks ago) wrote a blog post about how we got an informal invitation to display our science + art + communications project "Homo Colossus" at the upcoming World Expo (October 2020 - April 2021). KTH will be part of the program in the Swedish pavilion during two separate weeks (in November 2020 and February 2021) and our project would then be part of KTH's program. We were invited by Karin Larsdotter who is part of the working group that manages the KTH Expo 2020 program. That working group had a meeting in the beginning of this week and Karin then reported back to them.

Apparently that meeting was also attended by Mattias Hansson who is Program Director in the Committee for Sweden's Participation at Expo 2020 in Dubai. That means he is responsible for the contents of the Swedish pavilion for the duration of the World Expo (6 months). I don't know exactly how, but Karin apparently managed to set up a separate meeting between Mattias Hansson and the Homo Colossus project and all five project members (me, Mario, Åsa, Per, Belinda) could, with short notice, liberate ourselves from other commitments and meet up with Mattias Thursday this past week (Karin also attended the meeting). The picture (above) was published on the Swedish Expo 2020 Instagram account the very day after we met.

Mattias started the meeting by stating that Sweden had decided to participate in the World Expo back in 2017, so whatever objections could be raised, participation was in itself not negotiable. I have since managed to find the original mission statement (the outcome of a cabinet meeting in December 2017) where the mission from the Swedish parliament is stated:

"The Government has decided that Sweden will participate in the World Expo 2020 exhibition in Dubai, provided that the state and the Swedish business sector [näringslivet] finance the Swedish participation in equal parts.
[...]
The purpose of Swedish participation in Expo 2020 is to strengthen a comprehensive and positive image of Sweden abroad, to promote Sweden as a knowledge nation, the competitiveness and creativity of Swedish trade and industry and to strengthen Sweden's attractiveness for tourism and investments and for research, innovation and cultural exchange. [...] Promoting Sweden and Swedish trade, education and research collaborations, economic relations and cultural partnerships with other countries also create platforms to discuss issues such as democracy, gender equality, human rights, sustainability and environmental issues.
[...]
The total cost of Sweden's participation in the world exhibition is estimated at about 165 MSEK, of which the business sector [näringslivet] and the state are expected to contribute 82.5 MSEK each. In the Budget Bill for 2018, the Swedish Government proposes that 3.5 MSEK is allocated for that purpose in 2018, and estimates that an additional 50 MSEK is allocated for the years 2019-2021 to cover the state's share of the costs of Sweden's participation in the exhibition. In addition, several state-sponsored actors will contribute to [implementing and financing] activities that are related to the Swedish pavilion."

Mattias then talked about the two main kinds of critique that the Swedish decision to participate in Expo 2020 regularly gets; concerns about sustainability and concerns about the the lack of democratic rights in Dubai. Here's a critical just-published report from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs about "Human rights, democracy and the rule of law in the United Arab Emirates" (Dubai is one of the seven emirates that constitutes the United Arab Emirates). The official Swedish position is that it is only by participating (as one of 192 countries) that we have the chance to change things for the better (in terms of democratic rights, women's rights, guest workers' rights, sustainability etc.): "Our attitude is to go there and show them what we think we are good at, rather than sitting home and telling them what we think they do poorly."

It was apparent that Mattias had given this speech many times, he talked for at least 10 minutes straight and we hadn't even presented ourselves at that point. Mattias also mentioned that the World Expo expects 25 million visitors and that (at least) 1 million will visit the Swedish pavilion. These visitors will stay for different durations and can be thought of as "skimmers" (15 minute), "swimmers" (30 minute) and "divers" (2 hours).

I then presented (pitched) the Homo Colossus project and this eventually resulted in an offer by Mattias to be part of the permanent exhibition in the Swedish pavilion for the duration of the World Expo. We even started to discuss which particular spaces would be most suitable for Homo Colossus to occupy inside and outside the Swedish pavilion. Mattias was also particularly intrigued by my idea of sending KTH students to Dubai on a container ship bound for China (these ships stop in Dubai on their journey eastwards). The students would first go by train from Sweden to Genoa (Italy) and then by container ship to Dubai - a trip that takes around 17 days. I had framed such a trip as a way of decreasing the carbon emissions of a trip to Dubai but Mattias also saw such a trip as a huge opportunity in terms of a media campaign. What was really interesting for me though was that Mattias opened up the possibility of having Expo 2020 sponsor our students' trip.


This is the eighth (!) and last blog post about Homo Colossus during 2019. The project has morphed and changed and picked up the pace during the year and I suspect so much will happen in 2020 that I I could probably write a new blog post about the project every week. There are certainly many more things I could have written about in 2019, but the project is only part of what I work with and I feel I can't fill the blog with information about this one project when much else is also happening. I thus won't write a weekly blog post about Homo Colossus in 2020 - but I'm also sure I will write at least one blog post per month. The pace of the project is about to increase even further in 2020.
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Homo Colossus at World Expo 2020?

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The Swedish World Expo 2020 homepage

I attended the annual KTH Sustainability Research Day this past week (Thursday). I unfortunately missed the first two hours (I had a seminar with the students in my course), but the second half was really good. This blog post is however not about the KTH Sustainability Research Day but rather about what happened right after the official program ended.

At the reception, I chit-chatted with various friends and acquaintances and ended up talking to Karin Larsdotter who works for KTH Sustainability Office (who organised the event). Karin was the moderator for the just-held event and I congratulated her for a job well done. It turned out she is also part of a working group that will put together KTH's contribution to the upcoming (October 2020 - April 2021) World Expo in Dubai.

Almost before I had time to understand exactly what she wanted to talk about, she gave me a short speech about all the possible sustainability-related objections one could have towards World Expos in general and towards organising the next World Expo in Dubai in particular (not the most sustainable of places for starters). She said such objections were in the end moot, because KTH has made already the decision that we should be part of the World Expo. It was in other words a "done deal" at this point, but KTH had also decided that all KTH contributions to the World Expo should relate to sustainability (one goal would for example bo to "minimise" the number of trips to Dubai).

That's nice, I guess, but what did that have to do with me? It turned out the main question Karin wanted to ask me was if I/we were interested in representing KTH at the World Expo with our Homo Colossus project during the two weeks that KTH has access to the Swedish pavilion. I have never been to a World Expo and was a bit confused (not the least since the Homo Colossus project has not yet officially started), but I did of course not outright reject such an offer. Another complicating factor was however that I only had time to talk with Karin for 10 minutes since I had a schedule phone interview with one of the candidates for the PhD position we announced the previous month. I did however at the same time feel a great need to know a lot more about this offer and then discuss it with the other Homo Colossus project members. As I am currently very busy teaching, I suggested me and Karin should meet and talk a bit more about it up right before the Christmas break (a few weeks later).

Still, it was hard to put the aside and not think about it so what happened was instead that I immediately got in touch with the other four project participants (Mario, Åsa, Per, Belinda). I have also spent a considerable amount of time since then reading up on the World Expo as well as ways to go to Dubai without flying (train? boat? see the map below!). It turns out it is possible to go by train, but it is oh so difficult. The trip from Sweden to Turkey is long but comparatively easy; the hard part is to go through the eastern parts of Turkey and pass the border to Iran. To do that you need to:
- First travel from Ankara with the "Vangölü Ekspresi" to Tatvan. The train leaves Ankara twice per week.
- Then take the ferry from Tatvan to Van. The journey only takes four hours but boat schedules are only available locally.
- Take the train from Van (Turkey) to Tabriz (Iran). This train runs only once per week and the border control is in the middle of the night.
- Finally continue from Tabriz to Teheran and then travel to the coast.

Walking from Istanbul to Dubai would take 100 days even if you walked for almost 8 hours per day (the trip ends by crossing the strait of Hormuz by ship).

Another interesting alternative is to go by container ship from southern Europe (Spain, France, Italy or Malta) to Dubai. Such a trip that takes 2-3 weeks and it is also quite expensive.

Instead of postponing a follow-up meeting with Karin by 2-3 weeks, I wrote an email to Karin the very next day (Friday - just two days ago) and told her we needed to talk! I don't yet know what will come out of this but it's certainly very exciting! I am also pretty sure we can deliver - although I don't know exactly what we would deliver (what is called for). I guess that remains to be seen so stay tuned!

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page about Expo 2020, the Swedish government's info about Expo 2020 as well as the Swedish Expo 2020 website.

So exactly how bad is a World Expo from a CO2 emissions perspective? That's of course hard to say but Mike Berners-Lee wrote the book "How bad are bananas? The carbon footprint of everything" in 2010 and one of the examples in the book is an analysis of the CO2 emissions from the 2010 football World Cup. The World Cup was held in South Africa that year and it was estimated that 1.2 million spectators saw the matches live. The total CO2 emissions from the World Cup were estimated to be 2.8 million tonnes and transport (of players, spectators and everything else) accounts for about 85% of all emissions. The World Expo is however much much bigger and it has been estimated that the 2020 World Expo in Dubai will be attended by 25 million visitors during the 6 months that it is open....
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Reducing academic flying (public seminar)

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Me and Elina giving an open seminar at the Stockholm School of Economics

Me and Elina Eriksson held an open breakfast seminar, "Reducing academic flying", at the Stockholm School of Economics (HHS) on Friday November 29. This is the very first seminar we have given that is based on our just-started (autumn 2019) research project "Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice".

The invitation to give a seminar came out of in informal request on Facebook from Tinni Ernsjöö Rappe at HHS, with whom both me and Elina have previously worked (at KTH). I went back to our Facebook chat and discovered out that Tinni had asked me about giving a talk at HHS already in the beginning of September - when the project had hardly started! I postponed the talk as I thought it would be better to wait until we actually had something to say! Here is the invitation to the talk and further below are some thoughts about the seminar itself:

Reducing academic flying 

Should everyone in society fly less? Should also researchers fly less? How? Welcome to this breakfast seminar with Daniel Pargman and Elina Eriksson
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Academics fly more frequently than most other professionals. There are many questions, thoughts, feelings and opinions about this. Some questions are:

- Why do we researchers fly so much?
- Why do we fly more and more?
- Should everyone in society fly less?
- Should also researchers fly less?
- Should (and could) SSE decrease flying? 
- How?
- Do we (researchers) have to fly as part of our careers?
- Is there a correlation between flying and academic excellence?


In the talk, we presented our project, results from reading quite a few research papers about "academic flying" and the test data we have received - all KTH employees' all flights during a 12-month period (September 1, 2018 to August 31, 2019). Delivery of that data was severely delayed due to various reasons - unfortunately including internal KTH resistance from key persons to hand out the date, but we did in the end get access to the data in the beginning of the month. The data we asked for includes:

From our travel agency and for each plane trip by a KTH employee:

- Unique ID (employment number or something similar)
- Date
- Flight number
- Airport codes
- Price
- CO2 emissions

From KTH Human Resources and for each KTH employee:

- Unique ID (employment number or something similar)
- Year of birth
- Gender
- Position (PhD student, full professor etc.)
- Salary
- School and Department

From another HR system:

- Stated purpose of each trip

The presentation at the Stockholm School of Economics was followed by a lively discussion that could have gone on for much longer had we had the time. The people who showed up for this talk were all very interested in the issue of decreasing flying and besides people from HHS, there were also people in the audience from KTH, from Stockholm University and from Karolinska Institutet. 

We were also invited to come back a later point in time to present further results from the project, and I'm sure we will!

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Homo Colossus course assignment

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The energy footprint of a middle-class Englishman’s lifestyle (MacKay 2009).

We are about half-way through my main annual teaching commitment, the course "Sustainability and Media Technology" (DM2573) and this year we had to modify one of the weekly writing assignments for a couple of different reasons. While the content of this particular assignment had previously catered to my personal interests (having to do with the concept of Homo Colossus), I just about all-out highjacked the assignment this year so that the students basically worked for our not-yet-started science + art + communication project "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus". From the project application summary:

"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 in particular stated in the application that:

”These [Augmented Reality] portraits will be exchanged on a daily basis, randomly chosen from a larger pool of “personas”, e.g. fictitious persons that represent Swedes of different ages, genders, incomes, habits and lifestyle choices. Instead of representing “the average Swede”, these personas will illustrate the energy footprint of a range of lifestyles that exist in Sweden today; from the retired housekeeper to the executive who lives in Visby and commutes to Stockholm by plane on a daily basis.” 

While we were careful not to specify an exact number of personas in the research grant application, we have internally set the (very high) internal goal of working with 100 different portraits of different Swedish lifestyles. My "highjacking" of the course assignment consisted of me asking all my students to:
- 1) read our research grant application (it's only 3 pages long) and
- 2) create a ”persona” (sketch out a portrait of that persona and his/her lifestyle) and calculate the energy footprint (size) of that person's lifestyle. This value should then be translated into body weight (had that person been an animal that used an equal amount of energy to fuel its Huge body).

Below I paste selected parts of the instructions to the students and further below I also publish my feedback to the students after the task was completed. While the personas (as well as the calculations) need to be checked, the students submitted no less than 90 assignments and this is a big help and a big boost to the research project - it would have strained our fantasy to start with a blank paper and the task to invent 100 different lifestyles!

TEXT: Sketch out a portrait of an unusual lifestyle
- Choose an unconventional lifestyle. ”Unconventional” means that you can not choose an ordinary household, e.g. a family (with or without children) or a student living alone or with a partner. Think of a specific person who ”inhabits that lifestyle”, e.g. think of an unconventional friend, family member, acquaintance or possibly someone from a reportage you have read, a documentary you have seen or even a realistic but fictive person from a book or a tv series (no science fiction or fantasy!). 
- CLARIFICATION: High-energy (affluent) and low-energy (poor) lifestyles could be of particular interest in this exercise as are lifestyles that for some reason score high or low on specific ”energy-related activities/practices” (for example a person who for some reasons spends a significant part of her salary on petrol for her car or on flying).
- Write about one page of text (300-500 words – but more is OK if needed) about that person and his/her life, life history, lifestyle, motivation, hobbies, relationships, living arrangements, ”social practices” etc. Try to develop a rich portrait – the goal is to give someone who reads your text an understanding of that person and his/her life(style).

ESTIMATES: Estimate the energy footprint of your person’s/persona’s lifestyle. 
This part, ”estimates”, might look a bit daunting but should rather be seen as a checklist that you methodically work though.

- In his 2009 book ”Sustainable energy – without the hot air”, David MacKay calculates the energy footprint of the average middle-class Englishman’s lifestyle (”a typical moderately-affluent person”). Use the information below as a template/checklist and adapt it to fit your persona’s lifestyle. That means: you should vary the numbers when appropriate – but you should also comment and justify each choice and each important decison you make about your estimates.

- You don’t need to read anything from MacKay’s book to understand these calculations – but the whole book is available online for free at https://www.withouthotair.com).
- MacKay’s calculations (see the figure) indicate that the average middle-class Englisman uses 195 kWh of energy per person and per day. Average UK and European ”Primary energy consumption” (oil, coal, gas, wind, hydro, nuclear etc.) is instead only 125 kWh per person per day, but that figure excludes ”embedded energy”, e.g. energy that was used ”elsewhere” (for example in China) to manufacture stuff that is consumed in the UK, as well as the solar energy that was acquired ”for free” through photosynthesis and that is ”embedded” in the food we eat. 
- Please check and modify the following categories for your ”persona” (you don’t need to bother with the smaller categories but you can modify also those numbers if you want to):
1. Car use  (40 kWh/day)
2. Jet flights  (30 kWh/day)
3. Heating, cooling (of an apartment, house)  (37 kWh/day)
4. Food (farming, fertilizer)  (15 kWh/day)
5. Stuff & transporting stuff  (60 kWh/day)
6. Smaller categories (no need to customize):
∑ public services, gadgets, light (12 kWh/day)

This is followed by more detailed instructions about how to calculate the energy footprint of each of the categories, for example:

2 Jet flights (chapter 5 in MacKay)
- MacKay: one maximum-range (14 200 km) roundtrip on a Boeing 747 where every single seat is occupied (416 passengers) = 12 000 kWh = 33 kWh/day. 
- MacKay: A roundtrip between London – Los Angeles is shorter (9 000 km).
- MacKay: Most planes are not full – let’s say planes are on average 80% full.
- MacKay: One single roundtrip London – Los Angeles on an 80% full plane comes to 29 kWh/day ≈ 30 kWh/person per day
- Comment: It is easy to fly significantly more than one intercontinental trip per year
- Comment: use http://flightemissionmap.org to check the distance between different cities in the world
- Comment: go with MacKay’s figures after estimating and adjusting for the total distance flown by your persona in a year.

This exercise ends with translating energy footprint into weight:

2c) CALCULATION: Calculate the weight of your person/persona’s energy footprint. 

- Go through the checklist [above] where you have adapted each category to your persona. NOTE: it’s important that you justify each choice – but you don’t have to write more than one or a few sentences per category!

[...]

- Ask for help or at least compare your answer with a classmate to make sure your answer is not fundamentally wrong when you answer the question “How much does your persona weigh?”

After all students had submitted their assignments and I had had time to look at them, I wrote a message with some feedback to the students:

Hello.

I haven't read all the submitted Homo Colossus personas, estimates and calculations yet, but I have scanned and leafed through them and thus for example gotten to know 10 persons who have low (or very low) energy footprints (i.e. who weighs less than 10000 kgs) :

- My 91 year old grandmother
- Margaret Fairchild who has lived in a van for 15 years
- Sven (72) who lives in a hut in the woods
- Yara (21), a Syrian refugee who lives in Sweden
- Lea (24), and environmental activist
- Ms Person (28) who lives in collective/farm
- Sara Greenberg (25), a political science student
- Sarah Blom (36) who lives in a tinyhouse
- Emma who lives in protected residence for women
- Marita (82), a frugal pensioner

I have also gotten to know 10 persons with enormous (or humongous) energy footprints (i.e. who weighs > 150 000 kg):

- John Olofsson (39) - ex-professional snowboarder
- X (55), lawyer working in Moscow
- Aaron (25), a professional sportsman (NFL player)
- Alexander, CEO of Sustainable Feature
- Karla (20s), an Instagram influencer from Copenhagen
- My brother Michael (28) who lives in Munich
- Emma Marklund (27) who competes in racing
- Anna,  musician/bass player
- Dwayne ("The Rock") Johnson (47), actor
- Axl Rose, Rock star (Guns N' Roses)

Anna travels a lot as a musician and weighs 1 000 000 kilos and the last two on the list weigh about twice as much! I even got the tour dates for November 2019 for Guns N' Roses...

Thank you all for your assignments, they were really interesting and I will look closer at them after the course ends next week!

/Daniel

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How much do you (really) weigh? (popular science article)

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The first popular science article about our new science + art + communication project, "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus" has just been published. The article was published in Formas' online web journal "Extrakt" and Formas is the funding agency that gave us the money to run the project. I wrote about the project only two weeks ago when I pitched the project to be part of an upcoming (autumn 2020) exhibition at Färgfabriken.

While the project officially won't start until January 2020, I was contacted by journalist Karin Montgomery who works for Extrakt in the beginning of the month about doing an interview. The interview was conducted by phone on Monday November 11, Karin sent me a draft of the article for inspection and proof-reading three days later and the article was published online already the the next day. It should also be noted that the article was published one and a half months before the project officially started!

The title of the article is "Hur mycket väger du, egentligen?" ["How much do you (really) weigh?"]. It's a good "gateway" text - it's short and very easy to read but still captures the gist of the project.

The image above illustrated the article and it shows an artist (Joel) testing an app that our students developed in a project course one year ago. Since the project hasn't started yet, we don't have any "real" results to show (and we won't have anything to show until sometime next year). The article thus covers the background, the ideas and the plan but there is as of yet nothing to show in terms of results - that will have to wait until the end of the spring at the earlierst
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Homo Colossus at Färgfabriken (exhibition)

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Me pitching Homo Colossus at Färgfabriken. Photo by Per Hasselberg.

Less than a month ago I wrote a blog post about our just-approved research grant application, "From Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus: Visualising our energy footprint". I have however talked about these ideas for year, including when I was physically located at the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC), a research center that ended its planned 10-year run two years ago.

It thus came naturally to mention that the applications had been approved when I met ex-CESC director Mattias Höjer who immediately went about to put me in touch with Andreas Bergmark at Färgfabriken ["The Colour Factory"] by mail. Färgfabriken is an exhibition space which "since its inception in 1995 [has] served as a platform for contemporary cultural expressions with an emphasis on art, architecture and urban planning":

"It is important to create conditions for free and creative thinking. In this context, art is central. It acts as a catalyst for innovation in the meeting with the rest of society, as well as with individuals. Färgfabriken’s projects and exhibitions have a wide audience, including active decision makers, creators, artists and scientists – those who can make a difference today. Everyone is welcome to Färgfabriken.

Our approach creates space for exhibitions and projects that might not find its natural place elsewhere. Färgfabriken wants to make the invisible visible."

Me and Anders got in touch and I was quickly invited to give a talk at an event that Färgfabriken organised this past week, an "inspirational meeting" with short talks and workshops in preparation for an exhibition, "Symbiosis", that Färgfabriken will put together next year:

"We will discuss and develop ideas and examples of symbiotic thinking that have the potential to break habitual thinking patterns and which in the long run can create the conditions for a better future."

The Symbiosis exhibition will have four themes; "hinterlands", "de-signing ecology", "becoming human" and "planetary enterprise". I was a bit unclear about the exact purpose of the inspirational meeting, about who would be there and about my role in the event, but I got together with Anders to discuss these and other issues a week in advance. It turns out that Homo Colossus had made a quick career; the purpose of our presentation was not any longer to pitch our project to Färgfabriken, but instead to be part of Färgfabriken's pitch to their corporate partners/sponsors!

I was accompanied to the meeting by Homo Colossus project colleague Per Hasselberg (Konstfrämjandet) and I also met up with Mattias Höjer there (he has some kind of "advisory" role in relation to Färgfabriken). The presentation went very well so it does indeed seem that Homo Colossus will be part of the upcoming exhibition Symbiosis exhibition (more to follow on this topic next year).

I also met Jonna Holmstedt at the event. She's an artist who also has a ph.d. in visual arts and she is currently associated with the KTH Posthumanities Hub. It turned out that she too is an aficionado of brilliant Swedish social psychologist Johan Asplund and we will surely meet again at KTH in the not too distant future!


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

Addendum: The Symbiosis exhibitions has been postponed; it was supposed to open in the spring of 2020 but will instead open in the autumn. This is actually better for us and our project starts in January and it would have been hard to get something together already by April.
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The Train Conference Day (symposium)

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Image: The long and winding road from starting a Facebook group to becoming an influence

I attended the Train Conference Day [Tågkonferensdagen] this past week. My new research project FLIGHT ("Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations") is the concrete justification for attending. Here's the background to why there was a Train Conference Day in the first place:

More than 100 000 Swedes have by now joined the [Swedish-language] Train Holiday Facebook group to get inspiration for holiday train journeys and more than 1000 persons attended the Train Holiday Meeting back in March. More companies and organisations now want to take the train to their meetings.
- But which destinations and conference facilities are suitable?
- How can the trip itself be made part of the conference?
- What have other companies already done?
- And how does it matter to the climate if we take the train?

These and many other questions will be answered during the Train Conference Day 2019 at Clarion Hotel Stockholm.

The founder of the Train Holiday Facebook group, Susanna Elfors, is an old acquaintance of mine and she gave a short talk about her own personal journal from being a researcher (she has a ph.d. from KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and a social entrepreneur to an influences. Her train event partner and fellow co-organiser, Andreas Sidkvist, gave a short talk about obstacles and possibilities for chartering trains (which can be compared to how some companies are in the habit of chartering a plane).

The day for the most part consisted of a long line of inspiring 10 or 15 minutes long talks and my FLIGHT research colleague Markus Robért gave one of these talks. I will present some of these talks and I start with the four talks that interested me personally the most first (but all the talks were interesting!).

- Susannas Elfors presented the background to it all and she is right now surfing on an incredible groundswell movement with a half a decade long pre-history; she participated in a charter train trip to lake Garda in northern Italy together with her family five years ago. The trip wasn't very smooth and it tried the patience even of someone who was very motivated to take the train so she started a Facebook group afterwards (2014) to exchange advice and discuss train vacations. At the end of 2017, the group had a few thousand members. Then it exploded and the group now has more than 100 000 members and it consists of 70% women who join primarily due to climate-related reasons and 30% men who join because they love trains! (More than a third of the group members are women between 35 and 54.) There have since been numerous interviews and media coverage. Susanna and Andreas have started an event company and they now try to find ways to secure a stable income from all of this (Susanna complained that many others make money of the massive interest in train vacations but they don't yet). Susanna also mentioned that in Sweden we have now gone from "flygskam" (flight shame; more, more and even more) and "smygflyg" (sneak flying, e.g. flying but keeping quite about it) to "tågskryt" (train bragging). Susanna has also edited a coffee-table book, Tågsemester ("Train vacation") that I bought - it's the perfect Christmas gift!

A to me really interesting talk was that of Jim Werngren who works at Folkhälsomyndigheten [The Swedish Public Health Agency] and who talked about "Train bonus - a tool for sustainable business travel". The agency has two offices, one in Stockholm and one in Östersund (550 kilometers north) and Jim had, as a union representative, done a wonderful job to promote travelling by train between their offices instead of flying (which has traditionally been the norm). It turns out that not only is train the better choice for the environment but it's also the less expensive choice and through his personal industrious and indefatigable work, they now have new rules at this governmental agency. Flying is taxed internally and anyone who takes the train at distances above 500 kilometers (e.g. between their two offices) gets a salary bonus of 550 SEK per trip AND can also account for the extra time if the working day becomes longer than 8 hours ["endagsförrättningstillägg"]. Due to his work, The Swedish Public Health Agency got Swedish Rail's diploma for sustainable travel this year!

Another talk that was both interesting and instrumentally useful was Maria Klint's talk about using the train trip itself for conducting a company workshop. Maria works at the service and UX design agency Antrop  and her talk was very super inspiring since we are discussing to pay for a train trip to the upcoming (June 2020) ICT for Sustainability conference in Bristol for our whole research group. Maria's talk was very practical as she shared her experiences and she also offered to share the "conversation cards" they produced and used on their trip.

Another inspiring talk was that of Joakim Crona who is a doctor and a researcher at Uppsala University Hospital who wanted to travel by train to the huge research conference about cancer research in Barcelona that "everybody" in his field travels to (we're talking about 20 000 attendees!). He gave a very practical talk with lots of pictures of him designing a sign (Greta Thunberg style), taking photos and recoding a YouTube video that "went viral" (within a limited community of researchers). He then took the train from Uppsala to Barcelona and got more and more company when researchers joined up as they travelled through Europe. Joakim mentioned that he did nothing but talk about taking the train to the conference at the week-long conference and that they are now planning a second trip through Europe (now with increased administrative support - two other persons from Academic Conferences (a full-service Professional Congress Organizer for Karolinska Institutet, SLU and Uppsala university) had joined him at the Train Conference Day to learn more).

Other really interesting (but to me less instrumentally useful) talks were:

Thomas Eneroth, Swedish minister for Infrastructure who discussed investments in trains and tracks and routes - he said he wanted to give us more and better night trains to the continent - Hamburg, Berlin and Brussels! He also wants it to be easier to book trips and discussed how work is being done to make that happen. Thomas is apparently is a fan of the Train Holiday Facebook group. He gave the opening talk and then had to hurry away and while he said many nice things about trains, others snidely mentioned that he says nice things about cars and planes when he talks to other audiences. Still, it was hard not to be affected and infected by his enthusiasm for trains.

Jens Forsmark from Naturskyddsföreningen [the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation] is their expert on sustainable transportation and he talked about the train as the obvious choice in organisations' sustainability work. His fact-filled 15-minute talk was a fountain of knowledge! He claimed and also seemed to be a calm and peaceful person but mentioned that his work makes him end up in conflicts all the time since he has opinions about issues (taxes, city planning etc.) where there are many strong stakeholders who have interest in disagreeing with his conclusions. His thoughts about the structural characteristics of car and road-based versus train and track-based cities were very interesting! I had a chat with him at the break and we "clicked" - I'm quite sure I will be in touch with him again and that something concrete will come out of it in terms of some sort of cooperation at some point.

Another inspiring speaker was Maja Rosén who started the movement "Vi håller oss på jorden" ("We Stay on the Ground") and the campaign "Flygfritt 2020" ("Flight Free 2020") which aims at getting 100 000 Swedes to pledge not to fly during 2020. What is needed for you to make that decision is oftentimes that other people you know make the same decision. Maja also talked about the psychological dimensions of questioning each plane trip versus the relief of making a decision once and for all. A researcher she knows had qualms every time she had to decide whether to fly to attend a conference in Europe. Then she decided never to fly within Europe and her life suddenly became easier. She also mentioned that a Swedish politician in the EU parliament said to her that "to me there are no airplanes between Stockholm and Strasbourg".

Camilla Lystrand who is travel manager at White architects talked about how they have worked for more than a decade to fly only when absolutely necessary. This is a challenge as architects travek a lot but the effort and the thought that has gone into their internal work is both inspiring and commendable! One example is that internal meetings are planned so that they fit the schedule for arriving trains. Another example is that they always travel first class by train to improve the possibilities to work. The biggest cost for them is of course salaries and they are much more concerned with getting the most out of their employees rather than skimping on the (price of the) train tricket.

There were also a few other speakers who taked at the conference (again including my colleague Markus Robért). The event was attended by 50 persons including representatives from Swedish Rail as well as two different start-up companies who both work towards the goal of making it easier to book train tickets. While it works well within Sweden, it can indeed be very hard to book tickets for a longer trip that passes several national boundaries.

All in all it was very inspiring and worthwhile to attend this event. While I was surprised by how few people attended, that in the end made it easier to connect to those who were there and these really were the right people to connect to in all matters pertaining to train travel.
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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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