Calendar

Introduction to the Course and Why is Sustainability Important for You!

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman and Elina Eriksson, KTH

Guest lecturer: Samuel Mann, Otago University, New Zealand

Talk: The first part of the lecture is an introduction of the course with course information. The second part is a guest lecture about sustainability, and why sustainability is important for you as media technology students.

About: Daniel Pargman is an Assistant Professor in Media Technology at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. His research interests concerns social media, virtual communities, Internet culture, sustainability and resource challenges.

Elina Eriksson is working as a researcher at Green Leap and at the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC) at KTH. Her research interest has been in change issues, and user-centred design. However, on a personal level, the survival of the human race and her children in particular has pushed her into climate-sustainability-zombie anxiety, something she tries to harness in research.

Samuel Mann is an Associate Professor at Otago Polytechnic, in Dunedin, New Zealand. He effectively hold two positions – he teaches in computing (software engineering, interaction design) and hold the institution’s Education for Sustainability Portfolio.

Literature: No literature to read before the lecture.

Seminar with Samuel Mann on the Sustainable Practitioner

Sustainability and Sustainable Development - Defining the concepts

Guest Lecturer: Josefin Wangel

Content: The lecture will be an introduction to the concept of sustainability and sustainable development. In particular the lecture will cover different definitions and perspectives on sustainability and sustainable development and how these contrast each other. Furthermore, the lecture will touch upon values connected to these definitions and how different actors are or can be involved in sustainable development.

About: Josefin Wangel is a researcher, educator and project leader at the Division of Environmental Strategies Research (fms), the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC), and Green Leap, a network for design and sustainability. She sits in the steering group for the KTH Smart Sustainable Cities initiative. Josefin has a strong belief in issue-driven transdisciplinary research. Currently she is working in several research project, some of them being ICT for sustainable cities, Policy analysis of energy system transition, Certification systems for sustainable cities and Urban design for energy efficient everyday life.

Assignment: A brief and voluntary (but highly recommended) assignment before the lecture, scroll through the following sustainability models: http://computingforsustainability.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/ and choose a couple that you particularly like. Make sure to write down or memorise the number of the chosen models. During the lecture, we will use these as points of departure for discussing the concept of sustainable development.

Literature:

Mebratu, D.: Sustainability and sustainable development: historical and conceptual review. Environmental impact assessment review. 18, 6, 493-520 (1998)

Connelly, S.: Mapping sustainable development as a contested concept. Local Environment. 12, 3, 259-278 (2007)

Climate change and planetary boundaries

Lecturer: Elina Eriksson

Content: This lecture concerns climate change and planetary boundaries. We will go through the natural science background to climate change; the carbon cycle, green house gas emissions and the effect on life on earth if the global mean temperature increases. Furthermore we will also touch upon other important planetary boundaries such as biodiversity, freshwater use and biogeochemical flow boundaries.

About: Elina Eriksson is working as a researcher at Green Leap and at the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC) at KTH. Her research interest has been in change issues, and user-centred design. However, on a personal level, the survival of the human race and her children in particular has pushed her into climate-sustainability-zombie anxiety, something she tries to harness in research.

Literature:

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S.R., de Vries, W., and de Wit, C.A. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347, 6223 (2015), 1259855.

Steffen, W., Crutzen, P.J., and McNeill, J.R.: The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio. 36, 8, 614-621 (2007)

The impact of media industry and how do we know that?

Guest Lecturers: Malin Picha Edwardsson and Yevgeniya Arushanyan

Content: This lecture consists of two parts. The first part takes up the transformation of the media industry and the environmental impact of media production and consumption. Questions elaborated on are: what is the environmental impact of producing content for different media channels? And what is the environmental impact connected to media consumption? What is big and what is small in relation to media and sustainability?

In the second part of the lecture, the method of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is presented. Questions elaborated on are: What is LCA and how can it be done? What are the benefits and drawbacks? How can the method be used in different settings?

About: Malin Picha Edwardsson is a PhD student at the Centre for Sustainable Communications at KTH. She has a background in the media industry, both as a project manager within the Swedish Media Publishers’ Association, and as an editor at various Swedish newspapers and a weekly magazine. Her PhD thesis focuses on media production and media consumption, and on the future of media in relation to environmental sustainability.

Yevgeniya Arushanyan is a PhD student at the division of Environmental strategies research – fms and the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC). Her PhD thesis focuses on the life cycle environmental impacts of ICT and environmental impacts of future information society.

Literature:

Picha Edwardsson, M., 2014. Environmental aspects of media scenarios for the future ICT society – A qualitative study. Proceedings published at the ICT4S conference in Stockholm in August 2014.

Finnveden, G. & Potting, J. (2014). Life Cycle Assessment (3ed.). In: Wexler, P (Ed.), Encyclopedia ofToxicology, vol 3: (pp. 74-77). Elsevier.

Global resource challenges and implications for ICT and media

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

Content: You have by now heard lectures focusing on the meaning of sustainability and challenges regarding climate change (CO2 emissions, global environmental challenges etc.). I will try to convince you that resource challenges and a global "energy crunch" will pose a more immediate concern than the (possibly more serious, but also acting on a longer time horizon) challenge of climate change - even though these two issues are tightly linked. The first part of the lecture will concern resource and energy issues (especially "peak oil"). The second part will discuss implications for ICT and media technologies. Note: the first part of the lecture will use an "unorthodox" lecture format (see the instructions below).

About: Daniel Pargman is Assistant Professor in Media Technology at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. His research interests concerns social media, virtual communities, Internet culture, sustainability and resource challenges. He is a member of the steering committee for the KTH VINN Excellence Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC).

Instructions and literature to read before the lecture:

1) Start by looking at the 35 minutes long film with the not-so-uplifting name "There's no tomorrow" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg.

Please do not look at it on your smartphone while you're on the move. The film is packed with information, so treat it the same way you would treat a complex text (or a math problem). Concentrate on the movie and keep paper and a pencil at hand in order to write down any questions or thoughts that the film raises (the message is very grim and it should raise many questions and perhaps objections). The first part of the lecture will partly be based on the questions you bring to class. The movie below is "backed up" by two texts that you should read.

Rubin, Jeff (2009), "Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller: Oil and the end of globalization". Chapter 1, "Redefining recovery".

Heinberg, Richard (2003), "The party's over: Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies". Parts of chapter 1 ("Energy, nature and society") and chapter 2 ("Party time: The historic interval of cheap, abundant energy".

First-order effects of ICT and then Obsolescence

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

Guest lecturer: Christian Remy

Content: The first part of the lecture will concern first-order effects. In terms of direct, first-order effects of ICT, nothing positive can really be said in regards to their effect on the environment. We have to mine minerals to build them (Wägner) and these minerals will over time and by necessity become more scarce and expensive to acquire (Bardi). Besides mineral extraction, production and disposal furthermore have negative effects on citizens and ecosystems who often ”happen” to be located in poorer parts of the world (Cramer). One of the places where we ship our e-waste (old computers, routers, smartphones etc.) to have them disassembled and recycled is Pakistan (Umair and Anderberg). This all is pretty bad, but, are there any alternatives (Raghavan and Hasan)?

The second part of the lecture provides an overview of how Sustainable HCI research can address obsolescence, focusing on the interaction between user and device in the design of consumer electronics. After a short introduction into the general topic of obsolescence, a framework for obsolescence-related solutions from the field of Sustainable HCI is presented, accompanied by examples for how to realize some of the concepts in design practice.

About: Daniel Pargman is Assistant Professor in Media Technology at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. His research interests concerns social media, virtual communities, Internet culture, sustainability and resource challenges. He is a member of the steering committee for the KTH VINN Excellence Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC).

Christian Remy is a PhD Student at the People and Computing Lab at the University of Zurich. His research interests are in Sustainable HCI and Ubiquitous Computing, in particular how Sustainable Interaction Design can help us tackle issues of e-waste and obsolescence of consumer electronics.

Literature:

First order effects:

Instead of reading the paper, you should watch this 10-minute long presentation of the paper "Scarce metals as raw materials for ICTs: Do we care enough?" by P. Wägner and R. Widmer (2013). The paper was presented at the first international conference on ICT for sustainability (ICT4S) which was held in Zürich 2013. For some reason, the sound disappears during the last minute of the video (sorry for that).

Bardi, Ugo. "The universal mining machine." The Oil Drum (2008).

Cramer, B. W. (2012). Man’s need or man’s greed: The human rights ramifications of green ICTs. Telematics and Informatics, 29(4), 337-347.

Umair, S. and Anderberg, S. (2011). "E-waste imports and informal recycling in Pakistan - A multidimensional governance challenge".

Raghavan, B. and Hasan, S. (2012). "Macroscopically sustainable networking: An Internet quine". International Computer Science Institute report, TR-12-010.

Obsolescence:

Remy and Huang: Addressing the Obsolescence of End-User Devices: Approaches from the Field of Sustainable HCI. In: Hilty, L.M., Aebischer, B. (eds.) ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 310, Springer International Publishing (2014, in press)

Important and importanter - on values for transition

Guest Lecturer: Pella Thiel

Content: The transition to a resilient society is not all about energy, transportation and organic food. Maybe more important are our values - what we deem important, desirable and normal. This workshop will provide an approach to exploring the importance of the values that underpin concern about many social and environmental issues. It explores how recent social psychology research – particularly on values – provides a lens through which we can understand why people act as they do and how broad, long-term public engagement with problems such as climate change, global poverty, inequality can be achieved.

About: Pella Thiel has a master in ecology and long experience working with nature interpretation in NGOs and at the Swedish Center for Nature Interpretation at SLU. She is currently devoting most of her time working within the transition movement, both at a micro scale at her smallholding outside Stockholm, at community level and nationally within the swedish Transition Network, where she is chairing the board. Her main interest is in inner transition and that has lead her to explore work on values. She is part of the Common cause international network.

www.valuesandframes.org
www.omställning.net
www.transitionnetwork.org

Literature:

B. Knowles, "Re-imagining persuasion: designing for self-transcendence", in CHI'13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2013, ACM. p. 2713-2718.

People, design and practices in the smart grid

Guest lecturer: Cecilia Katzeff

Content: The future electrical grid is referred to as the “smart” grid because of its integration of ICT. One of its major roles in sustainable development is to facilitate for the inclusion of renewable energy sources in the electrical net. The smart grid field is very wide and includes new technology in the transmission grid as well as new products and services based on ICT. Smart metering and feedback to consumers about electricity consumption are examples of this type of services. Micro-production of electricity is also associated with the smart grid as well as the internet of things. The lecture will focus on people and practices in the smart grid and the role of design in the formation of sustainable social practices.

About: Katzeff’s work experience covers research as well as practical work within the design of IT from the perspective of users. For a decade Katzeff’s research has focused on the role of design of digital artefacts and services related to the transformation to a sustainable society and use of energy in various contexts, e.g. households, the workplace and public spaces. Katzeff currently manages projects involving field studies of sustainable practices and the smart grid.

Literature:

Broms, L., Katzeff, C., Bång, M., Nyblom, Å., Ilstedt-Hjelm, S. and Ernberger, K.: “Coffee maker patterns and the design of energy feedback artefacts”. Full paper presented at DIS ’10 The 8^th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Århus, Denmark August 2010, ACM. Published in Proceedings of DIS 2010, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-0103-9, 93-102.

Strengers, Y.: ”Smart Energy in Everyday Life: Are you designing for resource man?”. ACM Interactions, July-August 2014

A networked society contributing to positive change

Guest Lecturer: Marcus Nyberg

Content: The lecture will introduce a vision of a Networked Society and how that could transform activities through, for example, collaboration, resource sharing, awareness and dematerialization. It will present a more decentralized, less administrative and most importantly people-centric perspective for how societies can benefit from ICT. Along the way, a number of relevant ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) trends and concrete examples will illustrate possible contributions to more sustainable practices.

About: Marcus Nyberg is a senior researcher at User Experience Lab at Ericsson Research. He has worked within the field of user experience for more than 10 years with emphasis on transforming exploratory user research into ideas, concepts, tangible visions of the future, and sometimes patents. The role of the UX Lab is to concretize and conceptualize how Ericsson's technologies can be relevant in the future, and how they may interplay with societal developments.

More about the networked society: http://www.ericsson.com/thinkingahead/networked_society
Some concrete explorations at UX Lab: http://www.ericsson.com/uxblog/   

Literature:

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html

M. Weiser, "The computer for the 21st century". Scientific american, 1991. Vol: 265 No: 3: p. 94-104.

Data for sustainability

Lecturer: Jorge Zapico, MID/CESC KTH, LNU

Content: In this lecture we will explore how ICT and media technologies are transforming how we work with sustainability, making information more open, accessible and understandable and changing the ways we make sense of the world. We will also discuss the risks of this data-driven approaches.

About: Jorge Zapico is a post-doctoral researcher at KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, and at Linnaeus University. He has an engineer degree in computer science , a master in sustainable technology and a PhD on the relationship of ICT and sustainability and using data as a tool for sustainability. He is also co-organizer of the Green Hackathonseries of events.

Literature:

Zapico, J. (2013). The hacker ethic, openness and sustainability. Download here. Chapter in: The open book, Open Knowledge Foundation.

Zapico, J., Brandt, N., Turpeinen, M. (2010) Environmental Metrics: The Main Opportunity from ICT for Industrial Ecology. Journal of Industrial Ecology 14, 703-706.

Social sustainability and ICT

Guest lecturer: Assistant Professor Karin Edvardsson Björnberg, Elisabeth Ekener Petersen, PhD

Content: The lecture gives a brief introduction to the concept of social sustainability and the engineer’s responsibility for (socially) sustainable technological development. The first part of the lecture discusses the idea of a ‘safe and just space for humanity’ presented in Raworth (2012). In the second part of the lecture, tools for including social sustainability aspects into engineering practice, such as social life-cycle assessment, are introduced using examples from ICT.

About: Karin Edvardsson Björnberg is assistant professor of environmental philosophy at the Division of Philosophy (KTH). She specializes in normative issues related to environment and sustainable development. At present, she is the leader of a project focusing on ethical issues in green biotechnology in the Mistra Biotech research programme.

The research of Elisabeth Ekener Petersen is focusing in the social dimension of sustainable development. She was involved in the international  process of developing the standard ISO 26000 Social responsibility. She has a PhD in Social Life Cycle Assessment and has conducted several case studies using this methodology. At present she works in a number of projects addressing social impacts in areas such as sustainable cities, vehicle fuels and biotechnology.

Literature:

Raworth, K. 2012. A safe and just space for humanity: Can we live within the doughnut? Oxfam Dicsussion Papers. Oxfam, UK.

Ekener-Petersen, E. & Moberg, Å. 2013. Potential hot-spots identified by social LCA-part 2: reflections on a study of a complex product. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(1): 144-154

From Credit Crunch to Climate Crunch - How the ecology is acknowledged to suffer from overconsumption, and the economy is uniformly said to suffer from underconsumption.

Guest lecturer: Daniel Berg

Content: This lecture places the political drive for more sustainability in the framework of the monetary system. Taking its starting point in the Anno nullo of 2008 it tries to untangle the logic behind the rise to prominence of the global economic crisis over the world wide concern the same year of how to avoid an ecological disaster this century.The Credit Crunch became a Climate Crunch.

In a fundamental way, we all choose economic growth over ecological survival. That was our desire, granted that the choice was made through muddy, quasi-democratic channels. Desire is a historic phenomena however, differing from period to period in time. What forces channeld our desire to preserve a credit based money system over other concerns?

The lecture locates an answer to this prioritization in how our different global languages are all structured, the structure of language obviously the bricks and mortar of any "Media Technology" students of this course so far has encountered. Basic semiotics teach that meaning is organized around "master signifiers" to which various fixed points of reference are bound, that through their centrality dominates all other discourses. These central clusterns of signs create a "hegemonic effect", constructing a common overarching interest for all users of the dominated discourses, even those concerning the global ecological system we all depend on for utter survival. These fixed points of reference are such as  "value", "growth" and "inflation". The master signifier is "$".

Walking through the recent monetary history we examine how the monetary system has evolved from Bretton Woods and Keynes to the Washington consensus, Freidmans monetarism and beyond, transforming the very structure of "money" in the process, and as a consequence also how we describe and produce "value". This history presents us with a disturbing new way of looking at fixed points of reference such as "technology", "efficiency" and "green growth". At the same time we gain a cognitive structure to link political and moral discourses on sustainability as a matter of "consumer choice" and "individual responsibility" to the economic structures that govern our energy use, directs our desires and constructs our subjects. The aim of the lecture is not to discourage the use of new technology, but to position it.

About: Daniel Berg is a PhD student in Economic History at Stockholm University. His thesis dwells on the transformations of desire during the emergence of massconsumption in Sweden around the period 1870-1925, more specifically the trade and regulation of drugs. As a teacher and lecturer his focus has been on the interdependencies of monetary structures (finanzialisation, capitalism) with the energy and material flows ("real" economy) through the ever longer commodity chains (objects of desire) during the industrial era. This has also been the main topic for his recurring articles as a journalist in monthly magazines such as Ordfront and Glänta, and for his lectures as secretary of ASPO Sverige.

Literature:

Hornborg, A., (1999) Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution, Journal of Material Culture, Vol 4 (2) page 143-162

Sustainability and behavioural change

Guest lecturer: Greger Henriksson and Björn Hedin

Content: Gregers part of the lecture will concern everyday behaviour in relation to sustainability, through the lens of environmental sociology. He will talk about, and exemplify by, his research projects on e.g. congestion charges, waste and e-waste. Björn's part of the lecture will cover how behavior design and gamification can be applied in a sustainability context.

About: Greger Henriksson holds a MA (1994) and a Ph.D. (2008) in European Ethnology at Lund University (Sweden). Current position is as a senior researcher and teacher at the Division of Environmental Strategies Research at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He is also co-ordinating research on ICT use within CESC - Centre for Sustainable Communications. Earlier research includes studies of waste handling, consumption and the introduction of congestion charges in Stockholm. Most studies have been interdisciplinary and often done with partners outside academia.

Björn Hedin holds an M.Sc. in computer science (2000) and just presented his doctoral dissertation in Media Technology / Technology Enhanced Learning at KTH. He is currently leading a project financed by the Swedish Energy Agency where the goal is to use quantified self and behavior design to help individuals discover their energy consumption patterns and to improve their energy habits.

Literature:

Henriksson, Greger; Miriam Börjesson Rivera (2014) Why do we buy and throw away electronics? Paper at conference ISDR (20th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference), Trondheim juni 2014.

Henriksson, Börjesson Rivera and Åkesson (2012) Environmental Policy Instruments (congestion charging and sorting of waste) Seen as Negotiations

Webinar: "Designing for behavior change" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDThgLdH_g (1h 9m) 

A pdf on the same topic: http://actiondesign.hellowallet.com/documents/2014/03/toolkit-designing-behavior-change.pdf

A short introduction to gamification: https://class.coursera.org/gamification-003/lecture/22 (12 m)

Who is pedalling when you are watching kittens on youtube?

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

Content: Energy is invisible. Our daily use of electricity is invisible. So how can we even start to contemplate changing our behaviours and using less when we don’t have a visceral feeling for how much energy we consume? This lecture introduces the concept of ”energy slaves” as a way to help make the invisible visible. How many ”energy slaves” do we have working for us 24/7 to provide us with our modern lifestyles?

About: Daniel Pargman is an Assistant Professor in Media Technology at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. His research interests concerns social media, virtual communities, Internet culture, sustainability and resource challenges.

Literature:
- Human Power Station. Read the short text and see the 3-minute video clip on this page: http://www.electricpedals.com/human-power-station/
- Nikiforuk (2011), You and your slaves (4 pages), http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/05/05/EnergySlaves/
- Nikiforuk (2012), "The energy of Slaves”. Chapter 2, ”Slaves to energy”
- Homer-Dixon (2006), ”The upside of down”. Part of chapter 2, ”A keystone in time”
-Tomlinson, Silberman, Patterson, Pan & Blevis (2012), "Collapse informatics: Augmenting the sustainability and ICT4D discourse in HCI", in proceedings of CHI'12

Rebound effects

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

Content: Increased efficiency can despite our best intentions oftentimes have counterintuitive negative indirect effects that decreases or even reverses the hoped-for positive effects. We build better roads (to reduce bottlenecks and queues and to make the trip smoother and save gasoline), but what happens? People settle further away from the city, leading to more traffic and more time lost in queues instead of less. These perverse effects are as devious and difficult-to-fight as the mythical hydra (see picture below) - cut off one head and two new grow out. These are examples of the dreaded "rebound effect" that threatens to foil our plans even when we try to do good for the environment. Do read the literature and be amazed/shocked!

About: Daniel Pargman is an Assistant Professor in Media Technology at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. His research interests concerns social media, virtual communities, Internet culture, sustainability and resource challenges.

Literature:

Owen, D. (2011). The Conundrum: How scientific innovation, increased efficiency, and good intentions can make our energy and climate problems worse. Various very short chapters.

Hilty, L. (2012).  Why energy efficiency is not sufficient - some remarks on "Green by IT"", In: Arndt, H. K. (ed.): EnviroInfo 2012, Proceedings of the 26th Environmental Informatics Conference, Federal Environment Agency, Dessau, 2012.

Optional literature: 

Walker, R. (2011). Replacement Therapy. Atlantic Magazine (September issue) Comment: A very short text about how "our gadgets can't wear out fast enough" - how we have a "gadget death wish" and wish that our gadgets wear out/die as soon as a newer version (think iPhone, iPad) is released.

Crosstalks (2013). "Compensation for our lifestyle: How shortsighted can we afford to be?" Comment: KTH's own TV show!

Images of the future

Panelists: 

• Peter Nöu, Senior Program Manager at The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova)
• Ambjörn Naeve, Senior Researcher, KTH
• Erika Öhlund, PhD-student, Södertörns Högskola

Content: Course participants have been presented with a variety of images of the future. This lecture won't be a lecture at all, but rather a discussion between invited guests who are expected to have widely differing ideas and opinions about the future, and about the future of sustainability. Can we imagine a future sustainable society? What would it look like? What are our chances and what is our best course of action in attempting to reach that future? Furthermore, what is the role of ICT and media in relation to these questions and issues? 

About the panelists:

Peter Nõu is Senior Program Manager with The Swedish Government Agency of Innovation Systems (VINNOVA). He is central in defining and administering sectors of 'Information Society' and 'Sustainable Cities' within the 'Vinnova Grand Challenges Program'. Open data, crowd sourcing and intensive prizes are other initiatives he’s been driving since joining Vinnova in late 2008, as a senior expert in the ICT and services sectors. Prior to joining Vinnova, Peter worked 15+ years in CTO and CIO roles in various industries and startups, always engaged in implementing strategic advantages of Internet technologies. This became a passion of his already 20 years ago, when as employed by the Swedish Government, he saw the birth of the Internet economy in Silicon Valley during the years 1992-94. He later joined Telia Research and helped launch Passagen, the Swedish 'First Wave Large Portal'. Peter has also worked in the strategic management consulting firm SMG. His degree is in Engineering Physics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
Ambjörn Naeve is a senior researcher at KTH with a background in mathematics, physics, and computer science. For the last fifteen years he has been working with knowledge management and technology enhanced learning with a focus on methods and tools for communicative modeling, unplanned collaboration and disagreement management. He has long been an advocator of what he calls "the big switch", by what he means a transformation away from today's large-scale (globalized) production society - backed by our present small-scale and closed-access information society - towards more of a small(er) scale production society - backed by a large(r) scale and open-access information society. Apart from the environmental necessities, such a transformation would also incease social sustainability.
Erika Öhlund is a PhD candidate in Environmental Science at Södertörn University. Having a degree in International Economics, she is doing her PhD project within the research field Ecological Economics. In this field, the economic and social systems are considered to be dependent on the natural system, i.e. limited natural resources, processes and functions. Implications of this assumption is e.g. limits on economic growth and the search for social systems that can handle zero economic growth. In her PhD project, she analyzes agriculture in Sweden and Poland using theories about marketization, commodification, incommensurability of values, and degrowth.

Wrap-up

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

Content: We will wrap-up and summarize the course. You will also meet SEEK - Sustainable Engineering Everywhere, a KTH Student Organization.