Lecture 7

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