Technology Intensive and Sustainable Schools: A Discourse Analysis of Statements regarding the Use of ICT in Education in Lund

This thesis investigates the perceptions of people within the education sector in Lund Municipality regarding sustainability implications of the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in schools. It demonstrates how local perceptions are largely affected by powerful global neoliberal forces. The study is based on a critical discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with municipal employees. Technology is regarded as a social, cultural and political phenomenon. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the idea of technology fetishism and the five capitals model of sustainability. In the analysis of the empirical material, the CDA approach of N. Fairclough was adopted. The analysis shows that there is a discursive struggle between hegemonic neoliberal economic and digital society discourses, and a critical discourse. In addition, a number of sub-discourses appear in the texts. According to the findings, headmasters are mostly positive about the possibility of creating technology intensive and sustainable schools. The study reveals that local actions are affected by technology fetishistic ideals and the destructive relationship to natural capital that exist in today's industrialised society. Although individual schools cannot change the world order, they can serve as role models in the creation of technology intensive and sustainable schools through the promotion of learning, citizenship and equality. In so doing, they can minimise the reduction of natural capital as a result of the use of ICT, and contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of natural, human and social capital

The richness of designing for eco-social change: creative practice, transformative futures and living within limits

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the influential Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, which used computer modelling to show that, on a finite planet, current human resource use cannot ultimately be sustained. In this paper we use the anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the framing of limits in HCI. Following recent work in design and social science, we ask whether the idea of limits is an effective way to imagine, prompt and manage cultural change in participatory, sustainable HCI. Drawing from our experiences investigating participatory creative practice in the CreaTures project, we suggest that limits-led framings could be usefully held in tension with ideas of abundance. As researchers and practitioners of sustainable design, our job is often asking others to use less – whether that involves consuming fewer materials, less energy; or indeed even ‘un-making’ particular practices. We argue that directive change can be reconceptualised as ‘eco-social’ transformation: a fusion of care-infused ecological and social sensibilities to create existential change that would impact lifestyle and political choices (and technology use), turning to potentially abundant human resources of imagination, reflection and solidarity. We offer the example of The Hologram, a feminist economist healthcare art project situated online, to illustrate this potential

Understanding limits from a social ecological perspective

The latest developments in the field of HCI have given rise to an increasing interest in issues pertaining to global warming, resource depletion and environmental degradation. Concern about such issues has contributed to give shape to the design space of sustainable HCI (SHCI); a space whose boundaries are at times blurred. On the one hand, some, design “sustainable” information technology based on visions of the world that do not really question limits to continuous economic growth and, on the other hand, others embrace the design of information technology from stances that acknowledges limits (i.e., economic, ecological, energetic). This paper introduces the perspective of social ecology into SHCI. This perspective provides us with a core set of principles that makes us situate computing at the intersection of physical (natural) and moral (human) qualities of our human environment systems. As such it confronts us with choices to be made in the challenging years to come and invites us to argue about the very purpose of information technology in a world of limitations