All of Chris Preist’s team members have had papers accepted to the 2nd annual ICT4S (ICT for Sustainability) conference in Stockholm. The conference brings together researchers in the field of sustainability to discuss what role technology can play in encouraging a sustainable lifestyle, as well as investigating both the positive and negative impacts of technology.
Elaine Massung will be presenting a paper entitled “Beyond Behaviour Change: Household Retrofitting and ICT” about the work of the Digital Green Doors project and its deployment of a smartphone app at the Bristol Green Doors eco open home event. She discusses how technology can help make retrofitting within a community visible, thereby enhancing community learning and the spread of best practice.
Dan Schien is “Reviewing Top-Down Models of Internet Network Energy Efficiency”. Environmental assessments of digital services wishing to take into account an energy footprint of the Internet typically require models of the energy intensity of the Internet. The system boundaries of past studies have applied varied considerably, resulting in increased uncertainty in the assessment results. Dan has reviewed existing top-down models and found that the energy intensity of the general Internet network in 2014 varies between 0.05 and 0.6 kWh/GB when top-down modelling is applied, which is considerably lower than previous estimates had indicated.
Paul Shabajee’s “ICT 4 Climate Change Adaptation” outlines the varied nature of climate change adaptation contexts and presents a set of prototype tools that aim to enable the identification, exploration and assessment of opportunities for ICTs to play positive roles across that full spectrum of contexts. Paul also highlights the importance of considering the unintended consequences of technologies.
And Chris Weeks’ “Power law of engagement: Transferring disengaged householders into retrofitting energy savers” was one of only eight nominated for a Best Paper award. It asks the question “How can we move householders from being disengaged passive energy consumers towards being highly motivated retrofitting energy savers?” He introduces a “power law of engagement model for energy saving”, which breaks down the process of engaging householders into eight defined stages. The focus of the
model is both to build up an individual’s level of commitment and engagement, and to allow them to provide feedback into the community in order to increase the culture of retrofitting.