Last week we interviewed Hordur Torfason (leader of the Icelandic Cutlery Revolution – link coming soon).   The week before that we talked with Prof Bill Harris (expert on the Middle East). Both of these areas have seen a close relationship between the revolutions (and consequent supposed citizen-led society – with varying degrees of sucess) and the internet.   These discussions have me wondering about describing the pathway of a whole society and its interaction with technology in terms of Steve’s trajectories but at a larger scale.  Just a thought for the long weekend.

On our department facebook page an interesting debate has been raging, started by the following question:

I’d like to know (and I know of others who feel the same) what the Polytech intends to teach students about Apple’s business strategies (such as <a href=”http://funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/4402320/Apples+middle+finger/”>these</a&gt;) now that you have this “new Mac Suite”?  Does the Polytech condone what this company is doing to our planet with the practice of intentionally producing minimal lifespan, non-upgradeable, environmentally unsustainable products in order to maximise profits?

There are 96 comments, mostly a paragraph or two of constructive debate.  Perhaps surprising is that the level of  ’fan-boy’ accusation is remarkably low.

Here are my thoughts:

Otago Polytechnic has a mission of education such that “every graduate may think and act as a sustainable practitioner”. The main part of the “think” is being able to recognise the problem and have coherent discussion – so well done IT students.   The “act” means being “change agents” – so what to do?

My favourite definition of sustainability is “ethics expanded in space and time”.  This ethical basis means that there are no clear cut answers – sustainability does not come in black and white (see the famous trolley dilemma). While it might be simpler to do so, it doesn’t really make sense to claim outright Apple is “good” or “evil”.  Even if we did assume evil it is not a simple matter of yes/no having an Apple suite.  Several analyses have shown that while the negative impact – or “footprint”- of computing is huge and needs to be reduced, the potential positive impact – the “handprint” is far bigger.  To change the world we need to find our biggest lever and pull on it (to borrow from Archimedes).  The Polytechnic has a purchasing policy that details consideration of supply chain effects, but our far bigger lever is producing students who can make a positive difference.  Last year our top scoring project was a framework for producing smartphone apps in the field of citizen science – involving people in the environment. The first application of that was an iPhone app that will soon be released to every NZ school in the next few weeks with the goal of getting all kids onto the rocky shore and caring about the environment.

Is there an impact of engaging with Apple?  Yes. Are we making a positive difference – yes.

The purpose of this workshop is to raise awareness, spark discussion and evolve a research agenda in HCI about how to move sustainable HCI to the next level – one that goes beyond persuasion, adopts a deeper perspective on sustainability, and supports and prepares for transformations induced by large scale social and environmental change.

Call for Position Papers – Key Dates:

• Submission by: January 11th, 2013

• Notification of Acceptance: February 8th, 2013

• Workshop days: April 27th or April 28th, 2013

Themes to be considered by the workshop include;

Thinking about the Future: Can HCI help people – both those with specific roles such as policymakers, business strategists and community leaders, and the wider public – think about how the future might play out in away which engages and encourages action rather than pessimism. Such work might include visualisation of future scenarios, interactive exploration of alternatives,etc.

Adaptation: Preparing for likely changes: It is known that climate change will, and is already, changing environments in ways which impact communities:increased drought in some areas, flooding in others,future rising of sea levels. Communities not used to facing these challenges will need to, and advance preparation will make it easier: for example, altering crop planting patterns or community ‘flood preparedness’ training and resources. Similarly, the Transition Towns movement argues we should wean ourselves off petroleum. How can HCI help engage people with these issues in advance, rather than waiting till circumstance forces them?

Resilience: Building Cohesive Communities: Stronger local communities are more resilient to change and shocks; people are able to act together collectively in response to challenges, and strongly affected individuals are more likely to find support. Can online social media, mobile devices etc be used in such a way as to build more cohesive local communities? Can they help create support networks that exist beyond the virtual? Or do they naturally result in reduced cohesion?

IT in a Resource Constrained World: If we move to a strongly resource-constrained or post-collapse world,what will the role of IT (if any) be in this? Can we imagine datacentres, cloud, and ubiquitous devices globally, even in a resource-constrained (but not collapsed) world? How can IT be designed for a post collapse world? And what are the consequences of this for UI and HCI design?

Submissions

We invite the submission of 4-6 page position papers in ACM Extended Abstract format (http://chi2013.acm.org/authors/format) offering perspectives on one or more of the above topics. We also ask all submitting authors to provide a 100-150 word bio about their background and their reasons for wanting to participate in the workshop.  This will be published online.

Please note that attendees at the workshop are expected to attend at least one day of the main CHI conference.

Submissions should be made by email to chris.preist@cs.bris.ac.uk by Jan 11, 2013.

Key Dates:

• Submission by: January 11th, 2013

• Notification of Acceptance: February 8th, 2013

• Workshop days: April 27th or April 28th, 2013

Organisers:

Chris Preist – Dept of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK.
Samuel Mann – School of Information Technology, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, NZ.
Lisa Nathan – School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CA.
Daniela Busse – Samsung R&D, San Jose, USA.

Otago Polytechnic’s Bachelor of Information Technology capstone project sees groups of students undertaking real projects for real clients.

Jeffrey argues that we should look beyond the usual normative criteria to judge argument/essay papers:

Do I agree with the essay (or argument paper)?
Is this argument convincing?
Is the author fully justified in making that argument?
Did the author cite every author or theory that I would have, were I making this argument?

Instead, Jeffrey proposes alternative questions:

• Is a coherent (if not ultimately “correct”) position put forward, that is, a clear and non-universal point of view, perspective, or authorial voice?
• Is the position put forward interesting to [some relevant portion of] the HCI community? Is there any practical benefit for researchers or designers in HCI to have this sort of position available in our collective library?
• Is the treatment of the position authoritative, that is, well informed, substantially developed, and insightful?
• Does the position make a controversial concept, theory, or perspective more plausible or at least better worked out than it had been before (even if it ultimately fails to persuade)?
• Does the position challenge your own thinking productively? Or how people commonly think in [some relevant portion of] HCI?
• If you are inclined to formulate a response (e.g., by expressing how you disagree with this position), does your response push you to clarify your own positions and thinking in original ways (even if you disagreed with the position)?
• Does the position offer the possibility of a new way of thinking about a relevant problem?
• Does the position provide new resources, such as new concepts, technical definitions, canonical examples, categorization schemes, and/or distinctions that make our work as researchers and designers more productive or valuable?
• Does the position shed new light on familiar examples?
• Does the position reveal the importance of, or give us new reason to look at, hitherto overlooked examples?
• Does the position propose a new way of categorizing or classifying examples, and is the categorization itself interesting or important independent of what the position specifically does with it?
• Does the position help you or [some portion of] the HCI audience appreciate something of interest to the community as more complex, more successful, more problematic, etc., than it is normally considered to be?

I really like this approach.

First, it aligns with one of my favourite essays, that of Robert Root-Bernstein  who argued that science is not a search for solutions but a search for answerable questions – it must become acceptable to say “I don’t know”

Science is a way of asking more and more meaningful questions. The answers are important mainly in leading us to new questions. So try to learn some answers, because they are useful and interesting, but don’t forget that it isn’t answers that make a scientist, it’s questions.”

Bernstein challenges educators to train student to raise answerable questions that no one has ever asked (and we’re not going to achieve that by always getting them to answer questions to which we already have answers).

Second, I wonder if these questions can be backcast to design principles – particularly for sustainable interaction design.   The Sustainable Lens is based upon the notion of going beyond the simple reduction of marginal resource use, and beyond persuasion as the primary tool.  But other than perhaps vague notions of participation and criticality, we don’t really have much to replace persuasion.    This question from Jeffrey has me thinking:

If you are inclined to formulate a response (e.g., by expressing how you disagree with this position), does your response push you to clarify your own positions and thinking in original ways (even if you disagreed with the position)?

This is crucially different from merely disagreeing with a statement – or to be more precise, from an argument that is stated in such as way that it invokes a simple disagreement (or even agreement) response.  How might this goal of stating something in a way that pushes me to challenge my own position be translated to sustainable interaction design?

This lead me to a paper by Thomas Dietz on household actions to address climate change via “behavioural wedges”.

(Dietz) analyzed 17 types of household action that can appreciably reduce energy consumption using readily available technology, with low or zero cost or attractive returns on investment, and without appreciable changes in lifestyle

They calculated Reasonably Achievable Emissions Reduction (REAR) with a model combining potential emissions reduction with the plasticity of a behaviour. This plasticity is defined as the proportion of current non-adopters that could be induced to take action.

The most effective interventions typically (i) combine several policy tools (e.g., information, persuasive appeals, and incentives) to address multiple barriers to behavior change; (ii) use strong social marketing, often featuring a combination of mass media appeals and participatory, community-based approaches that rely on social networks and can alter community social norms; and (iii) address multiple targets (e.g., individuals, communities, and businesses)

This is sounding promising. But then I turned to the “spillover” literature. This is led by John Thøgersen and widely published (including this accessible WWF report Simple & painless: The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning). The premise of this is that interventions focussed on small changes are necessary but insufficient, and we can’t rely on a spillover to other actions.

Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little helps’. If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.

The comfortable perception that global environmental challenges can be met through marginal lifestyle changes no longer bears scrutiny. The cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes.

Thøgersen argues that if we “persist in advocating ‘simple and painless’ behavioural changes as a meaningful response to today’s most pressing environmental challenges, this must be because they are persuaded that such changes will encourage the adoption of other, and particularly other more ambitious, behaviours”. The idea of spillover compelling and can be traced to Bem’s self perception theory whereby we use our own behaviours as cues for our internal disposition. Thus “foot in the door” or “doing something painless”, and hey I’m recycling I must be a recycler…”. This then leads to a “virtuous escalator…leading them to engage in more difficult (and perhaps more environmentally significant) behaviours”.

Unfortunately, Thøgersen argues, spillover doesn’t work, at least not reliably:

However, we do not find evidence that positive spillover and foot-in the- door effects occur with the dependability that would be necessary to responsibly advocate their use as a major plank in engaging environmental problems (such as climate change) that require urgent and ambitious interventions.

There are many explanations for the failure of spillover, cognitive dissonance among them (and here this is perhaps counter-intuitive). While we might hope that we would strive to achieve greater consistency by increasing one’s pro-environmental behaviour, it is only one of several possible responses: another may be to abandon the existing pro-environmental behaviours.

what’s the point in taking the bus to the shops on a Saturday morning and leaving my car at home when I drive 30 miles to work each day during the week?

The theory predicts that increasing one’s pro-environmental behaviour will be the preferred option only if there are no other easier ways of reducing cognitive dissonance.

Not only does spillover not work, it provides an excuse for not doing more. It can even provide an excuse for continuing to be bad “it’s OK to drive a gas guzzler, I recycle at home”.

Thøgersen says that the onus is on developers of campaigns to reflect on their contribution to ambitious changes:

Environmental campaigners should be clear with themselves about whether a campaign is aimed at delivering a specific behavioural change (the actual focus of the campaign) or whether it is aimed at helping to elicit a wider set of behavioural changes (through positive spillover effects).

If we are to rely on spillover, then we need to make sure it actually happens. Thøgersen finds that spillover from one pro-environmental behaviour to others is more likely if the first is promoted as appealing to environmental imperatives than an appeal to financial self interest or social status.

Appealing simultaneously to several incentives (e.g. the financial savings and environmental benefits arising from energy-efficiency measures) is likely to reduce the instance of positive spillover into other pro-environmental behaviours.

What does all this mean for us?

Next year as part of our Sustainable Community Enterprise we are running a course on alternative energy generation. Participants will together build a windmill. Are we preaching to the choir? Do the skills and knowledge in the alternative energy spillover to wider energy literacy? Does it change behaviours? More to come…

To date we have broadcast 70 hours of material. Guests have included leading politicians, researchers, teachers and activists. People have come from a wide range of disciplines including business, psychology, tourism, education, art, conservation and computing.  There currently 12 people from computing fields on the website.  There are also several people in related fields, especially design and business.

Dawna Ballard studies the role of time. She questions the use of productivity as critical measure in work.

Mary Barreto connects visibility, awareness and accountability through social translucence.

Stefan Kreitmayer has a varied background developing interactive and reactive computer graphics for live performances. Stefan tells us how this background led to the development of the 4decades simulation game. 4Decades is a game developed to enable large groups to explore and critique scientific models of global climate economics. It is based on a real-time dynamic simulation that teams interact with via distributed tablets and public displays.

Gilly Leshed and Maria Håkansson are exploring the how individuals and groups accomplish tasks and socialize and the roles technology plays in these interactions. They talk about their backgrounds and a farm family study.

Lisa Nathan’s research is motivated by the high potential for interactions with information systems to have a long-term influence on the human condition. In this interview she tells us a bit of her background and then something of her research. Through a range of projects she investigates theory and method for designing information systems that address societal challenges, specifically those that are ethically charged and impact multiple generations (e.g., sustainability, colonialism, genocide), and information practices that develop and adapt as we use these systems.

Juliet Norton describes the interaction between the arboretum and computer science labs at the University of Central Florida. She describes her community guild software.

Michael Goldweber says that students are looking to make a positive social impact. We can do this without sacrificing rigour within the discipline by using social good as the motivating examples in courses.

Juan Pablo Hourcade from the University of Iowa is the passion behind the hciforpeace.org. In this interview he describes how this community is using computing technologies to promote peace and prevent conflict.

Olaf Schroth works for the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. CALP focuses on accessible solutions that bridge research and practice by bringing rigorous science and modeling, visualizations, innovative environmental design and participatory processes to community and landscape planning. Olaf talks about participatory collaborative planning through visualisation.

Six Silberman works at the intersection of art, economics, design, computing, business, sociology (this list goes on). He has come around to describing himself as a systems analyst.

John C. Thomas is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the development of Human Computer Interaction since the early 1970s. Most recently he helps lead the people side of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative. He was also a leader in the application of design patterns to computing.

Bill Tomlinson is Director of the Social Code Group at the University of California Irvine. Author of Greening through IT, Bill is the lead author on Collapse Informatics which recently won the CCC Sustainability Award.

Joe Davy and Martin Hyslop are Information Technology students at Otago Polytechnic.  They tell us how they are taking control of their own learning – with a sustainable twist.

Mann et al. (2010) describe the challenge of incorporating sustainability into computing education. One of the barriers is a paucity of resources describing people who have already made personal and professional journeys in the field of sustainable computing. Alstrum et al. (2008) described the Computing Educators Oral History Project (CEOHP). This is a collection of interviews with computing educators (currently 25 interviews http://www.ceohp.org/). Alstrum et al. (2011) describe how the CEOHP can be used in teaching:

While the interviews in the CEOHP collection contribute to the historical record by capturing life stories from a variety of computing educators, if leveraged appropriately these materials can encourage students to consider careers in STEM fields and, in particular, can provide role models and inspiration for female students.

We believe that podcasts are useful resources in their current form.  We do have plans, however, to develop learning support materials in the same manner as the CEOHP.

REFERENCES

Almstrum, V. L., E. A. G. Applin, B. B. Owens, E. Adams, L. J. Barker, J. Impagliazzo, P. A. Joseph, A. Kahlon, M. Z. Last, A. Lawrence and A. Young (2008). “Computing educators oral history project: seeking the trends.” SIGCSE Bull. 40(4): 122-141.
Almstrum, V. L., D. Muralidhar, M. Z. Last and B. B. Owens (2011). Teaching with CEOHP. Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education. Darmstadt, Germany, ACM: 354-354.

Mann, S., L. Muller, J. Davis, C. Roda and A. Young (2010). “Computing and sustainability: evaluating resources for educators.” SIGCSE Bull. 41(4): 144-155.