I have a 2004 Powerbook (G4 Aluminum, 15″) that my parents are using. It’s a beautiful machine, the aluminum body doesn’t show wear and the minimalist design is timeless. The only hardware problem is the battery that died some years ago, but as it is used mostly as a stationary it does not matter.

The problems begun when I had to reinstall the operative system. I hadn’t touched the system and it was still running OS X Panther (10.3). I reinstalled with the original disks. And then the problems started.

• There weren’t any programs available for OS X 10.3, no skype, no firefox, no flash, nothing. In the end I could find some legacy installers from external websites, but I couldn’t restore it to the original state. The firefox available for Panther is so outdated that many websites complain or don’t show correctly.
• I thought about installing a new OS, but the new Snow Leopard is just for intel macs, not available for old PPCs. What about buying Leopard or Tiger that could install in PPC? Apple don’t sell them anymore.
• Alright, trying Open Source. I installed Ubuntu for PPC. But most applications wouldn’t install on it.

So, suddenly I have a perfectly functional computer that it cannot really be used just because Apple decided to not support their own technology anymore. Software obsolescence.

I would still try to fix the computer, find some copy of Tiger that I can still, but that would be just delaying its death one year, as PPC or dual applications are not being supported anymore. My first thought and probably the response that any user would get from support is: buy a new one. Laptops mean life is around 3 years, with 6 years this one has have a long life.

But if we take in account that most of the environmental impact of the computer is connected to hardware production, shortening its lifespan and promoting buying new equipment is not the most sustainable strategy. This is quite connected to the Make It Green guideline: Support legacy systems, don’t design software just for the latest technologies and keep pushing the users towards buying new stuff.

* CC Photo from Redjar

I presented two full papers at Enviroinfo2010 in Bonn (International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection).

1. Carbon.to: Improving the understanding of carbon dioxide information

About carbon.to

2. Greenalytics: A tool for mashup life cycle assessment of websites.

Presenting Greenalytics.org

A preview version of my short article “Environmental metrics: the main opportunity of ICT for Industrial Ecology” has been published at the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The main point explored is that making environmental flows (such as energy use, resource consumption, waste streams…) visible as the main basic opportunity for ICT for environmental sustainability. Once the flows are visible, they can be accounted, they can be optimized, changes can be monitored, feedback can be provided to the users, results can be communicated.

See the abstract. If you are interested and can’t download it, send me a mail.

I’m quite interested in the increase use of IT for traceability and product transparency. I bought these merino wool socks and they came with a small code you could introduce in their website to get high granularity information about from exact which sheep station the wool came from and some information about the people behind, the story of the place.

More info.

What I’m researching right now is how to make this kind of information machine readable, so it can be used in other applications and in mashups in an easy way, bringing out the info in an open and standard way using a linked data approach.

In any case, knowing the story behind my socks made me more interested in the material itself, learning more about merino wool, and feeling better about and more connected with the product.

Carbon.to have been up now for nine months. It has been visited more than 5ooo times from 74 different countries. I consider that a success, the application have been received positively. People usually understand it directly and start playing with it right away.

A problem we discovered is that as the app is built using Ajax we didn’t have any information of how users were interacting with it, what were they comparing? I programmed a simple javascript logging system, and these are the results after a couple of weeks:

See bigger.

Some conclusions:

1. Most users are pretty active in the site and do not leave at first. The average interaction (changing units, clicking + or -) is close to 50.

2. Transportation units (as car km) are the most compared, together with electricity ones, and beer (I would have guessed that one . Food units on the other hand are not that popular.

This are just preliminary data, but with 12000+ interactions it’s already quite representative. More analysis will follow, for instance what is things people compare most against? and more interesting questions that arise. This is however a good step from not having any idea of what people were doing in the site and a good base for improving it.

Between the 10th and 15th of April I attended CHI 2010** in Atlanta. A very positive experience as I discovered a growing community of people interested in the use of computers for sustainability, and a corpus of articles very relevant to my work.

I can resume the most relevant points of what I did there:

• Intro and advanced courses on Research & Design for Sustainability: Organized by Eli Blevis from Indiana University and one of the most relevant persons in sustainable interaction design and Daniela Busse from SAP research lab at Palo Alto. Very interesting discussions, and I have now a big bunch of relevant papers to read. Great community there, probably the most relevant for the work I’m doing.
• Sense and Sustainability session: With one paper suggesting that persuasive techniques need to be adapted for different levels of awareness (One size does not fit all, Helen Ai He), and Leonardo Bonanni and Matthew Hockenberry presenting their project Sourcemap (more to come around this).
• Making Food, Producing Sustainability. Panel discussing the relationship between food production, sustainability and human computer interactions.
• Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI: Paper by Carl DiSalvo, Phoebe Sengers and Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir that maps the state of the art of sustainable human computer interaction and analyze the efforts and directions. Very interesting reading and in the lines of the conclusions we are getting. A must read!

In conclusion: a very relevant conference, lots of new contacts, a great community to be part of, great body of articles to relate to. See you in CHI2011!

* CC picture by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbanks/4524958711/

** CHI is the most important conference on human computer interaction, organized by ACM, and it draws in thousands of researchers and practitioners.

I’m writing this post from an iPad, I’ll write a longer comment about the sustainability problems and possibilities of this device. But I wanted to make a short entry on my experience of using it as an ereader (electronic reading is one of my interests).
Positive:

• The screen is gorgeous, the colors crisp and the viewing angle is good. The size is perfect for documents.
• Interactivity allows to do things as searching an unknown word in the dictionary, or copy it to your notes program.
• iBook program and store are neat and easy to use.

Negative:

• The screen is a normal light-emitting and it’s too tiring for comfortable long time reading
• It’s quite heavy and difficult to hold in one hand, for instance for reading in bed.
• Having internet allows multitasking and makes focusing in reading more difficult.

So after some use it confirms the expectations I had: the iPad is perfect for reading magazines in color and articles and documents. That together with the text editor and email make it a killer education/work device. But for reading books, the e-ink based devices as the Sony or the kindle are still the best option.

One interest in the persuasive services project is how CO2 information is presented. We have explored existing examples, different efforts and strategies for making the information easier to understand and more persuasive, and organized them into three different general groups based on the strategy used:

A. Comparing with a baseline

A common strategy is to put the quantitative information in context by using a baseline into which the data is compared.

This baseline can be just a way to improve the readability and have a sense of scale as for instance in Dopplr, where the emissions are presented graphically in bars so it is easier to see the scale differences.

The baseline can also be normative, comparing the emissions with an ideal or recommended behavior. One example is in the WWF carbon calculator where your result is presented in relation of how many planets would be needed if everyone lived like you. There is a recommended goal (living under “one planet” footprint) and the carbon information is presented in relation to it.

B. Comparing with other CO2 emissions

Another way to make the information easier to grasp is to translate it into the equivalent of another unit we can relate better to, e.g. the hours a light bulb have to be on for emitting such amount. An analogy often used is to use trees, translating CO2 information into the number of trees that would be needed to absorb it.

Dopplr uses this strategy in their yearly report sent to the users by email with aggregated information from their trips. It compares your carbon footprint with how much driving a Hummer during a year emits (How many kilometers of driving is not specified).

Another example can be seen in the polemic around Google search energy use. The Sunday Times published that two searches accounted for 7 grams of CO2, as much as boiling water for a cup of tea. The story was then refuted, but the use of the analogy of the cup of tea was a success, making the information much easier to grasp that the sole 7 grams. This success can be seen in the proliferation afterward of stories such as “A Google or a Cup of Tea: which warms the globe the most?” and can be seen as representative of the power of translating abstract information into everyday concepts to which we can relate.

This strategy has been also adopted with persuasive intents in marketing. Volkswagen used an iPhone application for demonstrate how little their new eco-fuel model emitted. The user blows in the microphone and it calculates how many kilometers the car can travel emitting the same CO2 as your breathing. Jazzcalculator a web service also from Volkswagen follows the same concept. It compares the CO2 emitted by traveling to the number of hours that a jazz band needs to play for emitting that (based on their breathing volume). For instance a trip of 200km emits 4,14kg of CO2 that equals 6:56 hours of jazz jamming (see figure 3).

C. Linking with the physical world

Carbon dioxide is invisible and odorless. When referring to emissions a measurement of weight is used, but this is not an easy understandable unit for a gas. Then another abstraction exists in that CO2 is just a cause of the problem, climate change, and its connection is not straightforward at the level of individual actions. These abstractions make the information difficult for users to understand. Different persuasive attempts have tried to close the gap by connecting the information with the physical world and with the consequences.

An example of trying to make emissions more physically visible is a WWF campaign where a cloud shaped black bag was attached to a car. The car was running during a day filling the bag with the exhaust making the emissions visible.

Sea level rise is one of the consequences of expected global warming. Even if it is not possible to link quantitative with individual actions it is possible to raise awareness about the connection. One example is this stunt in a bridge in Amsterdam, pointing out that driving will help water to reach that high level.

So..

The above examples show a trend to transform carbon dioxide into units that are easier for users to grasp. These alternative representations can be seen as a way to get around the fact that most people have poor carbon literacy. By using representations that users can relate to – things and actions encountered in everyday life – a greater understanding of climate impact can be achieved. We used these ideas as input for creating our application carbon.to

If you know more examples, please put comment and put the links!

I’ve assisted to the Artificial Intelligence for Development symposium, part AAAI 2010 Spring Symposium at Stanford March 22–24.  Artificial Intelligence for Development represents a growing  research interest on applying AI methodology as machine learning, data mining to development problems. The co-chair were Nathan Eagle from MIT / SFI and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research. Some representative examples from the sessions:

• Using ai in m-health for reducing expertise need, for instance automatic detection of diabetic reinopathy (Silberman et al) or heartsound diagnostics using a smartphone (Chena et al.).
• Data mining mobile use data from developing countries for gaining knowledge of their impact in society. Several interesting cases were presenting were they are using these detail records for research purposes.
• Using voice as data for helping farmers in rural India (Parikh, T) and using speech technology for information access (Barnard et al, Farrell et al)

During the last day I moderated one of the breakout sessions discussing the application of these methods for sustainable development and not limited to developing regions. This was great to discuss some of my interests as most of the session had not included a sustainability or environmental perspective.  The most interesting points of discussion from my point of view were:

• Using artificial intelligence for optimization (that’s one of the typical points of using ICT for sustainability) but also use ai  simulation methods for predicting and avoiding rebound effects of the optimization measures.
• Using ai for cradle to cradle implementation, both at the design process for creating products that make an optimal use of resources and that can be easily and completely recycled (ai 4 design, material sciences). And for accounting and verification that the resources loops are closed and efficient.

A very interesting symposium, very interesting attendees, and several points and inspiration to be taken for our research.

I’ll be in U.S. for six weeks starting this Sunday. I’ll be mainly located at U.C. Berkeley, working with my Marko Turpeinen. I’ll be also attending:

• Symposium on Artificial Inteligence for Development: Data-driven development is one of the areas I’m particularly interested. Stanford, March 22-24, http://ai-d.org/
• CHI2010, the biggest Human Computer Interaction Conference includes several sessions and courses on HCI and sustainability. Atlanta, April 10-15. http://chi2010.org

I’ll keep updating this blog with all interesting activities while away.