The impacts of domestic media and ICT:a study of digital technology, energy consumption, data demand and everyday practice

The growth of domestic energy and emissions impacts correlates with growing digital technology (e.g. ICT, consumer electronics) domestication and usage. New and ‘smarter’ technology, cloud based services, and on-demand content are reshaping how, when and where digital technologies are drawn upon, with the trend being one of escalation for manufacturing (more devices purchased more often) and network reliance (more and more services are becoming ‘cloud’ oriented). This escalation raises concerns over the environmental impacts of domestic digital technology, due to its use more frequently, and across more social practices. Motivated by this growth, there is now an even greater need to understand the underlying social situations and expectations that predicate certain ways and intensities of ICT in practice. The expectations of others, obsolescence (designed, or otherwise), changes of circumstances, life transitions, quality of experience, and expectations of technology all put pressure on users (or practitioners) contributing to the reshaping of social practices that involve digital technology. Previous focus on eco-feedback and behaviour change, along with more current understandings of digital technology variation and escalation, are not terribly insightful or necessarily linked to demand. Due to this, the variations in social practices, and the links to the varying energy impacts of households, are often overlooked. To move towards an improved understanding of digital technology’s role in social practices there is a need for both increased understanding of that role, and how these practices link to energy and emissions impacts. By improving this understanding it is possible to uncover the contexts in which energy demand occurs, and where it may be possible to lower energy demands. Through understanding the contexts of digital technology in social practices it is possible to gain deeper insights into the reasons for demand and impact variation. To date there has been no application of a method that links qualitative (e.g. semistructured interviews, photo elicitation) and quantitative data (e.g. per-device consumption data, per-application network traffic analysis) to provide a full understanding of how digital technologies are implicated in domestic social practices and energy demand. Based on mixed methods research, the three main contributions of this thesis collectively demonstrate how researchers and designers can gain a more nuanced understanding of the energy and everyday life impacts that are linked to digital technologies. Such understandings can result in very different implications for design, and un-design of digital technology, compared to that of prior work. First, through the combination of per-device energy monitoring across thirty-one participants, life-cycle analysis calculations, and semi-structured interviews, I bring to light a) the need for combining multiple methods, and b) broader scoped findings, contextualised by observations of practice, that go beyond more typical quantitative energy and emissions analysis. This contribution reveals the need for deeper understandings of the adoption and energy consumption of digital technologies. Through the combination of qualitative (e.g. semi-structured interviews) and quantitative data (e.g. per-device consumption data, per-application network traffic analysis) my second contribution demonstrates how modern mobile ICT (tablets, smart phones) enables loosening of the temporal and spatial constraints associated with non-mobile ICT. This loosening leads to the increased frequency of performances of social practices that were previously more static (performed in-place), leading to increased demand on Internet and cloud services. Third, to provide a deeper understanding of the roles of digital technology in social practices, I explore the meanings and competencies that surround digital technologies. Using interviews structured around photo elicitation, I explore the integration of digital technologies in ten participants’ lives. This contribution reveals how the connections between digital technologies, convenience, meaning, and competency lead to growth in individual and sets of devices, practices, users, and across different spaces. Thus, grounded in findings from three mixed-methods studies, this thesis interrogates how digital technology enables variation in social practices, which in turn leads to variation in energy impacts. To better understand the impacts of digital technology we should consider, more broadly, how these technologies feature throughout everyday life. Through better understanding the connections between everyday life, digital technology, and energy impacts we can better contextualise growth, and better design for more sustainable trajectories

Beyond data in the smart city:learning from a case study of re-purposing existing campus IoT

In this article we present a case study of our experiences of using existing IoT infrastructure to create a campus scale “living laboratory” for promoting energy savings and environmental sustainability. As a series of lessons for others creating IoT systems from existing city infrastructures we offer the challenges we have experienced through our attempt to join up and re-purpose existing energy monitoring and building management systems as an IoT infrastructure for a “smart campus”. We highlight the limitations of particular views of a campus from a purely data-driven perspective, advocating data- aware over data-driven approaches that engage with a wide variety of stakeholders. Finally, we reflect on the inclusion of people’s practices in understanding and designing smart cities, repurposing existing IoT, more careful consideration of ethics and domestication when co-creating smart campuses and the importance of challenging the existing rhetoric around energy waste in Smart Cities and Smart buildings research

The limits of HCD:reimagining the anthropocentricity of ISO 9241-210

Human-centred design (HCD) is just that: human-centred. As we approach the limits of Earth's biophysical systems, it no longer feels appropriate to place humans at the centre of design decisions. Yet HCD and its ISO—ISO-9241-210:2010—continue to be powerful and popular tools within many computing and design departments, as well as in their affiliated industries. These design approaches are perpetuating the trend of incremental improvements to the living standards of the already privileged and digitally connected whilst ignoring the broader environmental and socio-political effects of digital technologies. In this paper, we attempt to reimagine HCD and its ISO by drawing on fields and concepts such as sustainable interaction design (SID), animal-computer interaction (ACI), and object oriented ontology (OOO). Through this, we contribute a preliminary set of proposals about what needs to change with HCD and its ISO. We close by discussing the ISO development process and suggesting routes for environmentally concerned researchers to influence the evolution of HCD's ISO

The limits of HCD : reimagining the anthropocentricity of ISO 9241-210

Human-centred design (HCD) is just that: human-centred. As we approach the limits of Earth's biophysical systems, it no longer feels appropriate to place humans at the centre of design decisions. Yet HCD and its ISO—ISO-9241-210:2010—continue to be powerful and popular tools within many computing and design departments, as well as in their affiliated industries. These design approaches are perpetuating the trend of incremental improvements to the living standards of the already privileged and digitally connected whilst ignoring the broader environmental and socio-political effects of digital technologies. In this paper, we attempt to reimagine HCD and its ISO by drawing on fields and concepts such as sustainable interaction design (SID), animal-computer interaction (ACI), and object oriented ontology (OOO). Through this, we contribute a preliminary set of proposals about what needs to change with HCD and its ISO. We close by discussing the ISO development process and suggesting routes for environmentally concerned researchers to influence the evolution of HCD's ISO

Are people the key to enabling collaborative smart logistics?

The number of parcels delivered is growing annually, with a 15.7% increase to 1 billion parcel deliveries in the UK in 2015. We introduce Freight Traffic Control 2050 which is exploring how to transform last-mile urban freight through “collaborative logistics”. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, we introduce the context and challenges in this domain. We highlight the value of experience and tacit knowledge, and the importance of approaching this domain from a socio-technical perspective. We offer a selection of early challenges identified as a starting point for discussion within the HCI community

The Limits of Evaluating Sustainability

Designing technology with sustainability in mind is becoming more and more important, especially considering future scenarios of limited resources where the world’s current lifestyle of wasteful consumption needs to change. But how can researchers believably argue that their solutions are indeed sustainable? How can consumers and technology users reliably acquire, understand, and apply information about environmental sustainability? Those questions are difficult to answer, especially in research domains where the impact on sustainability is not immediately measurable, such as sustainable HCI. The evaluation of sustainability is an ongoing problem that is often glossed over, but we believe the community needs to intensify its efforts to articulate its evaluation methods to other disciplines and external stakeholders. Even if those disciplines and stakeholders understand the importance of designing for sustainability, we need convincing arguments – such as validation through thorough evaluations – to showcase why a specific design solution works in the real world. In this paper, we analyze this problem by highlighting examples of sustainable HCI research in which evaluation of sustainability failed. We also look at previous research that sought to address this issue and discuss how their solutions can be generalized – and when they might fail. While we do not have the final answer, our intention is to start a discussion as to why sustainable HCI research is oftentimes not doing enough to justify the validity of its solutions. We close our paper by suggesting a few examples of what we believe to be potential ways to address those issues and take action to improve the evaluation of sustainability

Shifting the maturity needle of ICT for Sustainability

The ubiquity of ICT means the potential of ICT4S covers a broad range of sustainability topics and application domains. However, ICT4S research can be ill positioned with regard to the complexity of transforming society in such a way that people and environmental ecologies can coexist in a sustainable system. The danger is that ICT4S becomes partitioned into a small subset of sustainability and using a limited set of the levers at our disposal. Grounded in the Mann-Bates maturity scale for sustainability this paper performs an analysis of the ICT4S conference corpus to measure how mature the research is in our field with regard to sustainability. Based on this analysis we identify areas in which the ICT4S community can begin to shift the maturity of research in order to promote sustainable futures. By applying the Transformation Mindset our article demonstrates through a series of illustrative how ICT4S can apply this mindset to shift ICT4S research towards more sustainable trajectories. This is an essential first step in taking stock, highlighting shortcomings and identifying opportunities in ICT for sustainability

Are there limits to growth in data traffic?:on time use, data generation and speed

This discussion paper considers the nature of growth in data traffic across the Internet, as a basis for asking whether and how such growth might slow down or otherwise be limited. Over the last decade, data growth has been dramatic, and forecasts predict a similar ongoing pattern. Since this is associated with increasing electricity consumption, such a trend is significant to global efforts to reduce carbon emis- sions. In this paper, we selectively explore aspects of data growth that are linked to everyday practices and the way they draw upon and generate Internet data. We suggest that such growth does have some conceivable limits. However, the nature of ‘Internet use’ is changing and forms of growth are emerging that are more disconnected from human ac- tivity and time-use. This suggests that although there may well be limits, in principle, to some forms of growth, total data traffic seems likely to continue growing. This calls for careful attention to the nature of the trends involved, as a basis for intentionally building limits into this system be- fore levels of Internet electricity demand becomes directly and more explicitly problematic

“Sustainability... it’s just not important.”:The Challenges of Academic Engagement with Diverse Stakeholders

Research at the intersection of sustainability and computing often engages with external stakeholders, and those engagements can determine success and impact of the sustainable goals as well as the entire research. In this paper, we reflect on various stakeholder en- gagements to derive lessons for the ICT4S community that seeks to broaden its sustainable impact beyond their own field. We briefly describe our experiences with case studies from each of the individual author’s research, and then synthesize across those experiences to reflect on similarities and differences. The resulting discussion highlights what we feel were our important lessons learned, as well as some of our thoughts on how to approach collab- orations or deployments with external stakeholders in sustainable computing projects