First-order effects of ICT and Obsolescence

Lecturer: Daniel Pargman

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 and these minerals will over time and by necessity become more scarce and expensive to acquire. 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. One of the places where we ship our e-waste (old computers, routers, smartphones etc.) to have them disassembled and recycled is Pakistan. This all is pretty bad, but, are there any alternatives?

The second part of the lecture provides an overview of obsolescence and of how Sustainable HCI research can address this, focusing on the interaction between user and device in the design of consumer electronics.

About: Daniel Pargman is Associate 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).

Literature:

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.

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)

Raghavan, B. and Hasan, S. (2016) Macroscopically Sustainable Networking: On Internet Quines. In Proc. LIMITS'2016, ACM.