Yesterday I participated in a workshop organized by CESC and Industrial Ecology at KTH around the use of ICT in developing Norra Djurgårdstaden (a sustainable neighborhood being developed in Stockholm).

The main points our group developed were (from my perspective):

• The use of ICT for increasing local life, creating a living and flexible neighborhood where ICT infrastructure facilitates social connections, exercising, culture. Also planning for new uses of the spaces connected with changes in work styles, where work, living and leisure is supported. Living local, traveling less, being more social, exercising more > Local sustainability.
• The need for a net of interconnected sensors that allows smart use of resources and accounting of environmental variables, from electricity consumption to material flows. Need for standard ways of sharing data. Open environmental data.

Interesting discussions and hopefully good input for the future development of Norra Djurgådstaden.

The first version of guidelines for a sustainable internet are now in PDF format ready to be used! Download them.

Today I presented a keynote at Valtech’s beautiful offices about ICT & Sustainability.

• First I introduced the concept of sustainability and the kind of problems we are dealing with.
• Then I presented the relationship of ICT and sustainability, both problems and possibilities.
• And finally I argued some concrete actions that can be taken from a IT developer perspective, based on the guidelines for a sustainable internet.

The discussion after the presentation was most interesting, dealing with concrete actions to be made, how to communicate them with clients, technical details as the use of client-side technology versus back-end…

Good vibe and interesting discussion. Looking forward to see further work implementing sustainability ideas and guidelines in their projects.

When registering to CHI2010 I got the option of not getting a paper conference program and getting it as an iPhone app instead (of course I selected yes)

If we take into account that an iPhone has quite a low CO2 impact, that there are around 2000 people attending, and that probably almost everyone in CHI owns an iPhone, the savings for this measure can be quite significant. Good example of dematerialization.

As my research is going forward, the focus has changed from mobile specific to more a more general Internet perspective. My previous blog, it’s a green mobile world, was slowly drifting away from my research focus.

Following the project on Sustainable Internet (see presentation) I have decided to migrate the blog to this site and use it as a platform for further exploring the guidelines.

Looking forward to this new stage!

I gave a seminar yesterday about my ideas of how internet could be more sustainable, both from an environmental perspective, both also from a personal / society perspective.
Here is the presentation:

Jazz calculator is a flash web site advertising the new eco-fuel VW Passat. It compares its low carbon emissions with the emissions a jazz band generate while playing (breathing generates CO2..). Even if the comparison is quite absurd (that’s the point) I think that its persuasion intent, to show how small the car emissions are, is pretty effective. This idea is quite in line with some of the discussions we’ve had at persuasion, and in line with carbon.to.

By DDB stockholm

The same agency developed a similar idea for the iphone, where your breathing emissions when blowing in the iphone mic were compared with how many km the car could drive emitting the same.

The usability of carbon dioxide information from sustainablecommunications on Vimeo.

Small presentation part of the World Usability Day 2009 activities. Disclaimer: I was sick so I was a bit slow and drowsy.

I saw the idea of linking to the source that was one of the prototypes from my master thesis in one anime serie (Net Ghost PiPoPa). The basic idea is the same, to use ict to create a link between the individual product and its producer in the moment of buying.

The food is tagged, in this case a QR code.

The screen at the shop plays a video of the producer telling the story behind the food.

Using persuasive techniques for (short term) beavioral term. Well done (at least as ad stunt). Check the video.

Via webbsverige