Understanding and Mitigating the Effects of Device and Cloud Service Design
Decisions on the Environmental Footprint of Digital Infrastructure
Sustainability, Design and Environmental Sensibilities
/
Preist, Chris
/
Schien, Daniel
/
Blevis, Eli
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.1324-1337
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Interactive devices and the services they support are reliant on the cloud
and the digital infrastructure supporting it. The environmental impacts of this
infrastructure are substantial and for particular services the infrastructure
can account for up to 85% of the total impact. In this paper, we apply the
principles of Sustainable Interaction Design to cloud services use of the
digital infrastructure. We perform a critical analysis of current design
practice with regard to interactive services, which we identify as the
cornucopian paradigm. We show how user-centered design principles induce
environmental impacts in different ways, and combine with technical and
business drivers to drive growth of the infrastructure through a reinforcing
feedback cycle. We then create a design rubric, substantially extending that of
Blevis [6], to cover impacts of the digital infrastructure. In doing so, we
engage in design criticism, identifying examples (both actual and potential) of
good and bad practice. We then extend this rubric beyond an eco-efficiency
paradigm to consider deeper and more radical perspectives on sustainability,
and finish with future directions for exploration.
The use of Digital Technology to Evaluate School Pupils' Grasp of Energy
Sustainability
Late-Breaking Works: Collaborative Technologies
/
Weeks, Christopher
/
Delalonde, Charles
/
Preist, Chris
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.1308-1314
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: This paper discusses the implementation of a smartphone application designed
to help develop school pupils' knowledge in relation to a number of energy
sustainability questions. This was then used as a method for collecting both
quantitative and qualitative data from teachers to help us better understand
the school pupils' levels of knowledge, engagement and awareness of energy
sustainability. The paper then takes a critical review of the application and
shows that it succeeded in spreading the expert knowledge of EDF Energy's staff
members, but failed to generate new habitual sustainable behaviours in the
school pupils.
The Use of Games as Extrinisic Motivation in Education
Understanding Gamers
/
Preist, Chris
/
Jones, Robert
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2015-04-18
v.1
p.3735-3738
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: This paper presents results of a controlled trial using a clash-of-clans
style game as an extrinsic motivator to encourage revision in 15-16 year olds
preparing for a maths exam. The trial demonstrates a statistically significant
improvement in performance among those using the game. We discuss differences
between our work and a previous trial that showed no performance improvement
from an extrinsically linked educational game, and present hypotheses as to why
the game structure we used may be effective within our chosen deployment
environment.
Expanding the Boundaries: A SIGCHI HCI & Sustainability Workshop
Workshop Summaries
/
Clear, Adrian K.
/
Preist, Chris
/
Joshi, Somya
/
Nathan, Lisa P.
/
Mann, Samuel
/
Nardi, Bonnie A.
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2015-04-18
v.2
p.2373-2376
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Following a challenge issued to the Sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to
broaden its boundaries to increase breadth and depth of impact [16] this
workshop will explore 5 key questions to encourage SHCI research to play a
broader role in tackling global sustainability issues and to support the
societal change that this will require. Out of this, it will produce a map of
existing and future research agendas, and a collaborative position statement.
It will also provide an environment of support and challenge to allow
individuals working in this research area to consider their personal practice
and the difficulties (both practical and emotional) they may encounter.
What have we learned?: a SIGCHI HCI & sustainability community workshop
Workshop summaries
/
Silberman, M. Six
/
Blevis, Eli
/
Huang, Elaine
/
Nardi, Bonnie A.
/
Nathan, Lisa P.
/
Busse, Daniela
/
Preist, Chris
/
Mann, Samuel
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2014-04-26
v.2
p.143-146
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: The role and influence of HCI research in addressing the challenges of
sustainability remains unclear despite ongoing interest.
Sustainability-oriented paper authors, workshop participants, SIG attendees,
and panelists have made ambitious predictions about the contributions of the
CHI community and identified critical directions for the field. But have
lessons from the past decade of HCI & Sustainability research been taken
substantively into practice, within and beyond the CHI community? Have they had
a significant positive influence on the vitality of the world's ecosystems? If
not, how can we re-orient? This workshop is a venue for taking concrete action
to integrate what we have learned about sustainability -- from within and
beyond HCI -- into a common framework to guide the community toward more
influential contributions and more rigorous evaluations of HCI &
Sustainability research.
Competing or aiming to be average?: normification as a means of engaging
digital volunteers
Volunteering and doing good
/
Preist, Chris
/
Massung, Elaine
/
Coyle, David
Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2014 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work and Social Computing
2014-02-15
v.1
p.1222-1233
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: Engagement, motivation and active contribution by digital volunteers are key
requirements for crowdsourcing and citizen science projects. Many systems use
competitive elements, for example point scoring and leaderboards, to achieve
these ends. However, while competition may motivate some people, it can have a
neutral or demotivating effect on others. In this paper we explore theories of
personal and social norms and investigate normification as an alternative
approach to engagement, to be used alongside or instead of competitive
strategies. We provide a systematic review of existing crowdsourcing and
citizen science literature and categorise the ways that theories of norms have
been incorporated to date. We then present qualitative interview data from a
pro-environmental crowdsourcing study, Close the Door, which reveals
normalising attitudes in certain participants. We assess how this links with
competitive behaviour and participant performance. Based on our findings and
analysis of norm theories, we consider the implications for designers wishing
to use normification as an engagement strategy in crowdsourcing and citizen
science systems.
A model for green design of online news media services
Research papers
/
Schien, Daniel
/
Shabajee, Paul
/
Wood, Stephen G.
/
Preist, Chris
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on the World Wide Web
2013-05-13
v.1
p.1111-1122
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: The use of information and communication technology and the web-based
products it provides is responsible for significant emissions of greenhouse
gases. In order to enable the reduction of emissions during the design of such
products, it is necessary to estimate as accurately as possible their carbon
impact over the entire product system. In this work we describe a new method
which combines models of energy consumption during the use of digital media
with models of the behavior of the audience. We apply this method to conduct an
assessment of the annual carbon emissions for the product suite of a major
international news organization. We then demonstrate its use for green design
by evaluating the impacts of five different interventions on the product suite.
We find that carbon footprint of the online newspaper amounts to approximately
7700 tCO2e per year, of which 75% are caused by the user devices. Among the
evaluated scenarios a significant uptake of eReaders in favor of PCs has the
greatest reduction potential. Our results also show that even a significant
reduction of data volume on a web page would only result in small overall
energy savings.
Normification: using crowdsourced technology to affect third-party change
Sustainability
/
Massung, Elaine
/
Preist, Chris
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'13 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2013-04-27
v.2
p.1449-1454
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: Previous work has shown how smartphone applications can support community
activism groups by enabling crowdsourced data collection. In this paper we
theorize that the data collected by the app can then be used to bring about
positive environmental behavior change by illustrating the adoption of new
social norms, a process we term normification. We provide a theoretical
framework for how this may be accomplished, both in general terms and
specifically with examples from the Close the Door campaign.
Changing perspectives on sustainability: healthy debate or divisive
factions?
SIGs
/
Busse, Daniela
/
Mann, Samuel
/
Nathan, Lisa
/
Preist, Chris
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'13 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2013-04-27
v.2
p.2505-2508
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: This year's Sustainability SIG invites participants to apply the conference
theme "changing perspectives" to sustainability research and practice within
the human computer interaction community. As the number of
sustainability-oriented endeavors in the field continues to grow, so does the
number of critiques on the work undertaken. Perspectives continue to shift
concerning how the HCI community "should" attend to the monumental ecosystem
changes societies face in the coming decades. For such an enormous problem, is
it best to concentrate our limited resources (time, money, people) on
compatible approaches in order to build on each other's findings? Do recent
critiques risk sundering a nascent community of scholars? Or is it misguided to
privilege a limited number of approaches to addressing a complex, problematic
situation?
POST-SUSTAINABILITY: a CHI sustainability community workshop
Workshop summaries
/
Preist, Chris
/
Busse, Daniela K.
/
Nathan, Lisa P.
/
Mann, Samuel
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'13 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2013-04-27
v.2
p.3251-3254
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: The goal of this workshop is to raise awareness, spark discussion, and start
shaping a research agenda in the field of Sustainable HCI. There are three
interrelated imperatives for this Post Sustainability workshop. First motivated
by the desire to move sustainable HCI (or Sustainable Interaction Design SID)
"beyond persuasion". Second, the desire to move the sustainability of SID
beyond an overly simplistic focus on single resource reduction. Third, the
challenge of adaption to environmental impacts on society, potentially
including societal contraction or collapse. The workshop will consist of a
structured brainstorming session to construct a research agenda and then
participants will, in groups, begin to develop action plans to realise this
agenda.
Using crowdsourcing to support pro-environmental community activism
Papers: evaluation methods 1
/
Massung, Elaine
/
Coyle, David
/
Cater, Kirsten F.
/
Jay, Marc
/
Preist, Chris
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2013-04-27
v.1
p.371-380
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: Community activist groups typically rely on core groups of highly motivated
members. In this paper we consider how crowdsourcing strategies can be used to
supplement the activities of pro-environmental community activists, thus
increasing the scalability of their campaigns. We focus on mobile data
collection applications and strategies that can be used to engage casual
participants in pro-environmental data collection. We report the results of a
study that used both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the
impact of different motivational factors and strategies, including both
intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. The study compared and provides empirical
evidence for the effectiveness of two extrinsic motivation strategies,
pointification -- a subset of gamification -- and financial incentives. Prior
environmental interest is also assessed as an intrinsic motivation factor. In
contrast to previous HCI research on pro-environmental technology, much of
which has focused on individual behavior change, this paper offers new insights
and recommendations on the design of systems that target groups and
communities.
Semantic web support for the business-to-business e-commerce lifecycle
Semantic Web Services
/
Trastour, David
/
Bartolini, Claudio
/
Preist, Chris
Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on the World Wide Web
2002-05-07
p.89-98
Keywords: DAML, automated negotiation, e-commerce, matchmaking, semantic web, service
description
© Copyright 2002 Authors
Summary: If an e-services approach to electronic commerce is to become widespread,
standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be
necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business
e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service
description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. By using DAML,
we develop a service description language sufficiently expressive and flexible
to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries,
negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be
carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully
supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue
that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols,
and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.
