Workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability

Environmental sustainability and climate change are issues which must no longer be ignored by anyone, any industry or any academic community. The pervasive technology, ubiquitous computing and HCI community is slowly waking up to these global concerns. The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: (1) How to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change. (2) Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. We want to start re-considering the impact of pervasive technology from an ecological perspective. (3) Digital divide between humans and the environment: Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides? 1. Theme of the workshop and topics of interest Environmental sustainability and climate change are issues which must no longer be ignored by anyone, any industry or any academic community. The pervasive technology, ubiquitous computing and HCI community is slowly waking up to these global concerns. The Nobel Peace Price 2007 was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. The citation highlights the urgency of the fact that information and awareness around causes and implications are necessary but not sufficient to combat climate change. Action is required. The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: 1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks (cf. Participatory Urbanism and Ergo at urban-atmospheres.net; realtime Rome at senseable.mit.edu; biomapping.net; placeengine.com) – may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change. 2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings (e.g., algae in lakes and oceans, kudzu vine in the southeastern US, rabbits and cane toads in Australia). Pervasive can be a dangerous term when the ecological impacts are disregarded. Pervasive technology is no different. In order to avoid further serious damage to the environment, this workshop aims to lay the foundations to start re-considering the impact of pervasive technology from an ecological perspective. 3. Addressing the 21st century Digital Divide: The mass uptake of pervasive technology brings about digitally networked and augmented societies; however, access is still not universal. Castells and others use the notion of the ‘digital divide’ to account for those whose voices are not heard by this technology. Initially, the divide was seen only between the first and third worlds and then between urban and rural, but with today’s near ubiquitous coverage, the digital divide between humans and the environment needs to be addressed. Virtual environments could give the natural world an opportunity to ‘speak’. How can we address imbalances? For example, sensors embedded in the environment could allow creeks and rivers to blog their own pollution levels, local parks can upload images of native bird life. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides? 2. Topics of interest Topics of interest include but are not limited to: • Transfer persuasive and motivational approaches and experiences from design cases which successfully employ pervasive technology in areas such as games and entertainment, health, and marketing and advertising, e.g., competition, collaboration, rewards, team play, make it fun. • Innovative ways or re-appropriated ways to reduce the impact of computing production (e.g., increase the life cycles of computing devices; re-purpose older computing devices for sensor networks, data logging and other low-performance but increasingly useful tasks; re-think the design of computing devices to allow for more efficient and thorough recycling of components). • Considerations of what ‘pervasive technology’ means from an ecological perspective. • New applications of pervasive computing technology to support environmental education and decision making in formal (school, work) and informal (leisure, play, everyday) settings. • Evaluations and evaluation methods for assessing the impact of pervasive computing devices, applications on the environment. • New interfaces of pervasive computing devices, systems and applications and modes of interactions between people and nature. 3. Format After the introduction of the organisers and the key themes of the workshop, we will do a little icebreaker activity in the form of mini interviews followed by brief informal peer introductions of all participants. We then want to generate a common knowledge base for the workshop on environmental sustainability by collecting information on what we know about the issues at hand, e.g., sources of data on climate change, accessibility and legibility of that data, current impact it has or lack thereof. After morning tea, the workshop breaks into three rotating groups (starting with 1/2/3) according to the three themes: 1. Motivation, 2. Ecological impact, and 3. Digital divide between humans and the environment. After lunch, these groups rotate themes so each group works on each theme: 2/3/1, followed by 3/1/2. Following afternoon tea, we hold a plenary to share results and discuss further steps, plan the Design Challenge 2009, discuss collaboration arrangements beyond the workshop and allocate tasks to volunteers. Design Challenge 2009: Impact! In addition to the conventional academic outcomes, we want to define a number of feasible goals and design a process to bring these goals to fruition within 12 months time and present them at Pervasive 2009. Additionally, we want the workshop to be an opportunity to exchange research insights, expertise and ideas. We also want to leave enough breakout and social time to allow for professional networking opportunities. 4. The organisers Marcus Foth: ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia and 2007 Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, UK. Interests: urban informatics, master-planned communities, social computing, social networks, triple bottom line sustainability, wombats. urbaninformatics.net Christine Satchell: ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry), Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Interests: HCI, scenario and persona design, young people, digital nomads, mobile technology, puppies. Eric Paulos: Director, Urban Atmospheres, Intel Research Berkeley, USA. Interests: urban computing, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, intimate media, sasquach. paulos.net Tom Igoe: Associate Arts Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York, USA. Interests: physical computing and networking, sensor networks, ecologically sustainable practices in technology development, monkeys. tigoe.net Carlo Ratti: Director, SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT, Boston, USA. Interests: Architecture, sensor networks, real-time data, urban technology, urban planning, crocodiles. senseable.mit.edu 5. A selection of relevant readings CLIMATE RISK. (2007). Towards a High-Bandwidth, Low-Carbon Future: Telecommunicationsbased Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Fairlight: Climate Risk Australia. DARBY, S. (2006). The Effectiveness of Feedback on Energy Consumption (DEFRA report). Oxford, UK: Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. DE YOUNG, R. (2000). Expanding and Evaluating Motives for Environmentally Responsible Behavior. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 509-526. FOGG, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. FOGG, B. J., & ECKLES, D. (2007). Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford Captology Media. HERRING, H. (1998). Does Energy Efficiency Save Energy: The Implications of accepting the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate. Retrieved Apr 2, 2008, from http://technology.open.ac.uk/eeru/staff/horace/kbpotl.htm MONBIOT, G. (2006). Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. PAULOS, E., HONICKY, R. J., & HOOKER, B. (2008, in press). Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism. In M. FOTH (Ed.), Urban Informatics. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Notes on the Political Image: Pervasive Computing, Modeling Assemblage, and Ecological Governance Abstract: What are the larger opportunities for pervasive computing technologies to monitor and model the intricate assemblages of the natural and artificial environments? Perhaps more importantly, how might such media contribute to or even constitute in a new kind of reflexive governance in the image of the information they produce? We consider what is at stake for such a constitution by locating it in theoretical insights from other contexts. In outlining current and future research directions, we underscore the necessity of environmentally produced information to concretize itself not merely as data for some later, deferred political action, but as a direct political image: an instrumental diagram in its own right. What are the larger opportunities for pervasive computing technologies to monitor and model the intricate assemblages of the natural and artificial environments? Perhaps more importantly, how might such media contribute to or even constitute in a new kind of reflexive governance in the image of the information they produce? We consider what is at stake for such a constitution by locating it in theoretical insights from other contexts. In outlining current and future research directions, we underscore the necessity of environmentally produced information to concretize itself not merely as data for some later, deferred political action, but as a direct political image: an instrumental diagram in its own right. Agencies: Borders, Sensors, Interfaces Far from borderless, our world is filled with an apparent infinity of political borders , biological borders, logistical borders, informational borders. “Things” (flora, fauna, and machines, data) assemble, expunge and express themselves within this segmented landscape. We see such borders also as interfaces, membranes which govern the conditions of exchange between any paired complex bodies (from ambient air and soil to a bank customer and her money.) An environmental sensor, be it a flower petal or inscribed silicon wafers microcasting in near-field communication, is, in Bruno Latour’s parlance, a kind of actant. (Latour, 2005) It speaks on behalf of some condition in this little network and communicates to other parts of the system. The interface, in this case that sensor, thus takes the position of a limited agent in the whole system, and in it, the smallest transactional unit of data, becomes itself the emergent actor in this landscape of borders. The Pervasive Scenario: To Govern What? The driving scenario understood by us, is one in which there would be a local administration of each interface’s expression -what toxins flowers absorb, what plastics are allowed through customs, what concrete infrastructure cracks under slow pressure—based on what is heard and is relayed through a pervasive network of networks of computational monitoring media. But once data is gathered what does this image look like in detail, and what is done with it once we have it? Individual events in this listening landscape are absorbed as signifiers, are correlated according to as yet unimagined protocols, and are registered not only as information about which a governance might act, but for us as the actual medium of some non-governmental political apparatuses would register themselves back onto the world. That is, first the information is a map or diagram and then, more interestingly, that same information becomes an interface. In this, governance is not delivered by the management of “human rights,” but instead acts according to new constitutional forms, yet to be formally ratified. Its work is not simply policing an environmental homeostasis, but of direct management by participation of ecosystemic interfaces as the constitution of a new polis and politics. (Mouffe, 2005) It is that imminent political diagram, not yet present, that redefines interfaces less as pure information than as positions in an expanded parliamentary territory; neither a ‘standing reserve’ of objective datapoints nor a undifferentiated naturalized unity. (Heidegger, 1993) Policy and Relationality At NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic, these operations are designed as a matter of institutional policy (or policy is made as a matter of design.) They are a model for how ecological interfaces, both human and nonhuman, both organic and inorganic, can be understood as site of health. And health is then less the individual body and the medicines that might be inserted into it to contain undesirable states, than it is the external, plural, at-hand living and non-living worlds of the urban landscape. Here a fertile middle-ground is taken as the location of prescription and operation. The individual lung and the gathering storm system are engaged at once by design, as both public health records in their ways. Both provide an open form of evidence of what the administrative unit and ecological microcosm that is NYU is doing and has done through its multi-scalar participations in the urban ecology of the city. As with any Clinic, at EHC prescriptions are given. But here prescriptions are offered both to individuals and to architectural systems on how to better monitor and adjust or redesign the causal interrelationships in which they work. Some Recent Projects Toward This: A Portfolio of Prescriptions Some projects at NYU’s EHC work to monitor and measure that evidence, and others to redesign through it. For example, One Tree Project, in which genetically identical trees were planted across the Bay Area acts as a formidable monitoring interface for the effects of ambient environmental variation on the complex mechanisms of organic growth. In another,, 1400 face masks were distributed to the mingling hordes of protesters and pedestrians during the Republican convention in New York, which together worked as a networked surface on which individual consumption of air pollutants was traced and tracked. In these, distributed interfaces express and even compute, socially legible evidence of ecological interactions. But instead of such symptoms rendered through a mediating layer of silicon computation, these simple, extremely analog devices draw their evidence more directly. This allows a more direct experiential response to the information they express, but like any such image they require another step before becoming instruments of change and governance. Other NYU EHC projects directly redesign the assemblages at work (DeLanda, 2006). No Park, for example, uses a legal gap in traffic storage interfaces (i.e. no parking zones in front of hydrants) to install intricately designed gardens which absorb automobile related pollutants right where they are generated. Here the socio-ecological network of the city is neither smothered nor rarified, but amplified and engaged by configuring it at the level (and height) of collective assembly. Future projects seek to engage at the scale of the NYU micro-city and its architectures. One locates solar panels not on rooftops but as window shades, circumventing the difficult regulations of solar collection technologies in Manhattan as well as locating the production side of shared energy infrastructure at the direct personal level of individual dorm and office dwellers. He and she can see and relate to their energy consumption footprint at the literal scale of his or her own footprint. Another improves on the vogue for rooftop gardens as decorative micro-parks for people and turns them into gray water treatment machines that support the interlocking purposes of ground-level and migratory species across the city. Data Smog and the Missing Expert In these projects a problem of translation and activation is introduced, one that is not solved by the amassing of more computational power and the scattering of sensors into the world. That is, natural systems work very well already as monitoring devices, but we have yet to formulate complete constitutional images of their participation. We have yet to find the best ways of making an image-instrument of their political profiles, diagrams of their evidence that constitute an effective agency. Scaled somewhere between the medical care of the individual body and the continental sweep weather modeling , the an ecological polis is largely unmanaged and unarticulated. To introduce an layer of engineered listening and speaking media into and onto the ambient environment (in parking lots, wetlands, cloud clusters, lung cells, etc.) will open a flood of information about how worldly systems perform and relate. By flipping the on-switch, as it were, and being at once able to monitor and model the interrelationships of all assemblages at once, would be akin to the invention of the microscope, opening up the complexity and agency of worlds we could not imagine. But would it also be a din of voices that we simply do not have the means to properly listen to, to govern through: a churning cacophony of signals? The design impulse will be to model these signals into dataclouds, undulating traffic clusters that allow datasets to be sliced and figured by different patterns and variables. We believe that such data clouds have purpose and potential but cannot by themselves realize either. Dataclouds have a tendency to inappropriately reassure their audiences. They imply, in the grace and intricacy of their renderings, a presumed expert system (and expert) on whose behalf they are fictitiously designed who must be using these information as an instrument of government, somewhere. If not now, soon. Dataclouds signify control but too often only defer agency to that missing expert. This is part of the work that they do as blog culture memes. They assure; they present the affect of a political agency that is still to find its bearings. The data cloud looks like expert instrumentation, but does the closed frame of its bounded diagnostic, in fact make it easier for those viewing the data cloud to retract their own involvement back into logic of simulation and to remain spectators? What is the political space of air quality? What would it mean for such images to work more effectively as interfaces? How can the images of evidence, produced by pervasive sensing media, work not just to display information about socioecosystmes but to turn their audiences into users who can, in the direct course of their habitation of the world, compute by their interactions a preferred assemblage of what the image represents? How can the data that becomes diagrams, become again instruments of a new political space? The answer to these, we believe, lies in the specification of both an ecologically appropriate political scale and a constitutional image of that polis, which in turn may rely on the encounters between pervasive computing and ecological governance. Notes: Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum. London. 2006. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” Basic Writings. Ed. David Krell. HarperCollins. New York. 1993 (1954) Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press. 2005 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political. Routledge, New York. 2005. Author Biographies Benjamin H. Bratton (SCI_Arc, UCLA, Yahoo!) invents systems concepts and translates and transposes them into actual systems. This labor requires him to where many hats for different occasions, including sociologist, design strategist, professor, software executive, and historian of exceptional violence. He teaches architects about double-bind ironies at SCI_Arc, media artists about topologies of logistics at UCLA, and enterprise product strategists about the social specification of emergent data channels at Yahoo!. Natalie Jeremijenko (NYU Environmental Health Clinic) is a polymath design technologist and political affectician, working within the wormholes connecting experimental art and global science policy. She has taught at the world’s august institutions, been shown in the toniest arts festivals, received the most competitive awards, and annoyed the most miscast authoritarians. THE POTENTIAL OF UBICOMP TECHNOLOGIES TO DETERMINE THE CARBON FOOTPRINTS OF PRODUCTS Ali Dada, Thorsten Staake, Elgar Fleisch 1 Institute of Technology Management (ITEM-HSG), University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland 2 Information Management, ETH Zurich, Sonneggstrasse 63, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland 3 SAP Research CEC St. Gallen, Blumenbergplatz 9, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] www.bits-to-energy.ch Abstract Several problems exist in accurately quantifying the greenhouse gases (GHG) which result from the production, transportation, usage, and recycling of products. We review in this paper the current attempts at measuring GHG emissions and investigate the potential of UbiComp technologies in improving the state of the art in carbon footprint calculation and in communicating the result to consumers. This has potential benefits on consumer awareness and behaviour and can also foster competition among companies towards higher energy and resource efficiency.Several problems exist in accurately quantifying the greenhouse gases (GHG) which result from the production, transportation, usage, and recycling of products. We review in this paper the current attempts at measuring GHG emissions and investigate the potential of UbiComp technologies in improving the state of the art in carbon footprint calculation and in communicating the result to consumers. This has potential benefits on consumer awareness and behaviour and can also foster competition among companies towards higher energy and resource efficiency.