From One Edge to the Other:Exploring Gaming's Rising Presence on the Network

Audio and video streaming and on-demand services have dramatically changed how, and how much, media is consumed. Streaming generally allows a much larger selection of content, and arguably greater convenience. Gaming is the latest medium to place delivery of content into the cloud, via services such as Google Stadia and NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Just as with video streaming, this new ease comes with a hidden cost from the infrastructure used to deliver it, including the hardware cost, engineering cost and the energy to power the data centres and communications networks. Although gaming is currently only 7% of global network demand, with more than 95% of that being made up of downloading content, the possibility of streamed games could rapidly change this network footprint. In turn, this affects the yearly growth of energy impact from IT services. We explore possible futures where growth of these services continues, and we illustrate the implications a decade from now with three possible future scenarios for shifts of gaming practices. Our analyses show that game streaming will cause significant increases in the energy and carbon footprint of games

Bearing an open “Pandora's Box”:HCI for reconciling everyday food and sustainability

The sustainability of food is a significant global concern with a drastic change required to mitigate complex social, environmental, and economic issues like climate change and food security for an ever increasing population. In this article, we set out to understand the place of food in people's lives, their mundane yet surprisingly complex ways of sourcing their food, and the processes of transition, past and ongoing, that shape these choices. Our goal is to understand the potential role for digital interactions in supporting the various ways that food consumption can be made more sustainable. To inform this exercise, we specifically set out to contrast the journeys of committed sustainable “food pioneers” with more conventional mainstream consumers recruited in branches of a UK supermarket. This contrast highlights for both groups the various values, and “meaningfulness” attached to foods and meals in people's lives, and suggests ways in which food choice and pro-sustainable practices can be supported at least in part by new digital technologies

Towards an holistic view of the energy and environmental impacts of domestic media and IT

To date, research in sustainable HCI has dealt with eco-feedback, usage and recycling of appliances within the home, and longevity of portable electronics such as mobile phones. However, there seems to be less awareness of the energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of domestic consumer electronics and information technology. Such awareness is needed to inform HCI sustainability researchers on how best to prioritise efforts around digital media and IT. Grounded in inventories, interview and plug energy data from 33 undergraduate student participants, our findings provide the context for assessing approaches to reducing the energy and carbon emissions of media and IT in the home. In the paper, we use the findings to discuss and inform more fruitful directions that sustainable HCI research might take, and we quantify how various strategies might have modified the energy and emissions impacts for our participants

Exploring (un)sustainable growth of digital technologies in the home

HCI and Ubicomp research often centres around the support of humans interacting with digital technology. Despite this obvious focus, there seems to be less work on understanding how these digital technologies can lead to growth in use, dependence, and influence practices in everyday life. In this paper we discuss how digital technologies have been, and continue to be, adopted in domestic practices—and how the growth of interactions with various ecologies of digital technologies can lead to growth in use and energy consumption. We further the discussion within ICT4S and sustainable HCI on how to promote research that encourages sustainability as a core concern—socially, economically, and ecologically—emphasising that defining limits to growth are important when trying to affect change in sustainable directions. We echo calls for more significant sustainability research from HCI, and set out some avenues of design for moving in this direction

Demand in my pocket:mobile devices and the data connectivity marshalled in support of everyday practice

This paper empirically explores the role that mobile devices have come to play in everyday practice, and how this links to demand for network connectivity and online services. After a preliminary device-logging period, thirteen participants were interviewed about how they use their iPhones or iPads. Our findings build a picture of how, through use of such devices, a variety of daily practices have come to depend upon a working data connection, which sometimes surges, but is at least always a trickle. This aims to inform the sustainable design of applications, services and infrastructures for smartphones and tablets. By focusing our analysis in this way, we highlight a little-explored challenge for sustainable HCI and discuss ideas for (re)designing around the principle of 'light-weight' data 'needs'

'We Can Send A Man To The Moon But We Can't Control The Temperature In Our office'; A Considerate Approach To Workplace Thermal Comfort by Older Women

From Fanger's seminal work on thermal comfort in the 1970s, standards governing temperatures in the workplace enshrine clothing level calculations based on full business suits, and building regulations developed using only male metabolic data, locking in a default male perspective. Even later work that highlights gender biases with regard to metabolism calculation, inclusive of both genders has focused on younger women, and the voices of older working women are missing from this discourse. We invited women over 45 to explore what they find important in workplace thermal comfort, and how devices and interfaces might meet their needs and also encourage thermal adaptivity. Our study highlights factors such as 'fresh air', and the importance of empathy to fellow inhabitants. We bring new voices to the thermal comfort discourse which supports reducing energy use in the workplace, improving thermal environments and ensuring the needs of a diverse, aging workforce are considered

Energy in Schools:Promoting Global Change through Social Technical Deployments

Reducing carbon emissions is a key priority across the globe, and in the UK, schools have been identified as the second largest users of non-domestic energy. In this paper, we present an IoT solution for schools that aims to unite senior leadership, teachers, and pupils in the goal of reducing or shifting their energy consumption and carbon emissions. We achieve this by prompting behavioural change through instrumenting schools with sensors, visual displays, and a variety of educational resources which use the BBC micro:bit to interact with the data produced by these sensors, enabling pupils to engage in educational activities to solve real world problems. By increasing the visibility, availability, and interactivity of data, we enable a new space for dialogue between facilities managers and building users. We summarise some of the challenges and lessons learned so far, with preliminary results indicating our approach is effective in raising the profile of energy management and shifting demand. Future monitoring and evaluation will provide more detail on the effectiveness of our IoT solution

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Using Fine-Grained Infrared Positioning to Support the Surface-Based Activities of Mobile Users

Knowledge of the fine-grained location and orientation of devices on a surface can be used to enhance the surface-based computing tasks of mobile users in the home and workplace. However, existing systems which provide surface-based positioning information are often not a practical solution for mobile users, since the systems all rely upon pre-installed and calibrated environmental infrastructure. In this paper, we present prototype positioning devices for surfaces which do not rely on such infrastructure. We show that inexpensive infrared transducers can be used to effectively sense relative location and orientation of surface devices. We evaluate the novel approach of using intensity of light pulses for fine-grained location measurements