International Conference on Pervasive Computing

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability to be held at the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 19th, 2008, Sydney, Australia

http://www.urbaninformatics.net/green/

Environmental sustainability and climate change are issues which must no longer be ignored by anyone, any industry or any academic community. The pervasive technology, ubiquitous computing and HCI community is slowly waking up to these global concerns. The Nobel Peace Price 2007 was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. The citation highlights the urgency of the fact that information and awareness around causes and implications are necessary but not sufficient to combat climate change. Action is required.

The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold:

1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks (cf. Participatory Urbanism and Ergo at urban-atmospheres.net; real-time Rome at senseable.mit.edu; biomapping.net; placeengine.com) – may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change.

2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings (e.g., algae in lakes and oceans, kudzu vine in the southeastern US, rabbits and cane toads in Australia). Pervasive can be a dangerous term when the ecological impacts are disregarded. Pervasive technology is no different. In order to avoid further serious damage to the environment, this workshop aims to lay the foundations to start re-considering the impact of pervasive technology from an ecological perspective.

3. Addressing the 21st century Digital Divide: The mass uptake of pervasive technology brings about digitally networked and augmented societies; however, access is still not universal. Castells and others use the notion of the ‘digital divide’ to account for those whose voices are not heard by this technology. Initially, the divide was seen only between the first and third worlds and then between urban and rural, but with today’s near ubiquitous coverage, the digital divide between humans and the environment needs to be addressed. Virtual environments could give the natural world an opportunity to ‘speak’. How can we address imbalances? For example, sensors embedded in the environment could allow creeks and rivers to blog their own pollution levels, local parks can upload images of native bird life. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Further information is available at
http://www.urbaninformatics.net/green/

Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology
Christine Satchell, Queensland University of Technology
Eric Paulos, Intel Research Berkeley
Tom Igoe, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York
Carlo Ratti, SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT

Accepted position papers

Notes on the Political Image: Pervasive Computing, Modeling Assemblage, and Ecological Governance
Benjamin H. Bratton 1, Natalie Jeremijenko 2
1 University of California, Los Angeles, USA
2 New York University, USA

The Potential of UbiComp Technologies to Determine the Carbon Footprints of Products
Ali Dada 1,3, Thorsten Staake 2, Elgar Fleisch 1,2
1 Institute of Technology Management (ITEM-HSG), University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
2 Information Management, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
3 SAP Research CEC St. Gallen, Switzerland

Towards Participatory Design of Ambient Persuasive Technology
Janet Davis
Department of Computer Science, Grinnell College, USA

Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Behavior Changes with a Virtual Polar Bear
Tawanna Dillahunt, Geof Becker, Jennifer Mankoff, Robert Kraut
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Points of Persuasion: Strategic Essentialism and Environmental Sustainability
Paul Dourish
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA

Understanding motivation and enabling action towards change
Penny Hagen, Duncan Underwood
digitaleskimo.net, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia

The New Well-Tempered Environment: Tuning Buildings and Cities
Dan Hill, Duncan Wilson
arup.com, London, UK, and Sydney, Australia

Promoting Environmentally Sustainable Behaviors Using Social Marketing in Emerging Persuasive Technologies
Omar Khan, John Canny
Berkeley Institute of Design, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Context-Aware Pervasive Persuasive Systems for Managing Water and Energy Usage, and CO2 Emissions: Multi-Levelled Policies, Goals, and an Expert Systems Shell Approach
Seng W. Loke, Jugdutt Singh, Hai Le
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Using persuasive technology to encourage sustainable behavior
Cees Midden, Teddy McCalley, Jaap Ham, Ruud Zaalberg
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Participate: Producing a Mass Scale Environmental Campaign for Pervasive Technology
Mark Paxton
Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, UK

The Design of Imprint: "Walk the Walk" and Other Lessons
Zachary Pousman, Hafez Rouzati, Katie Collins, John Stasko
Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA

Understanding and Influencing Spatio-Temporal Visitor Movement in National Parks Based on Static and Dynamic Sensor Data
Katja Schechtner, Helmut Schrom-Feiertag
arsenal.ac.at, Vienna, Austria

TerraPed: A Design Concept for Sustainability
Jennifer Stein
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

Challenging Comfort & Cleanliness Norms through Interactive In-Home Feedback Systems
Yolande Strengers
School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Taking the Guesswork out of Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyles
Ronak Sutaria 1, Aalok Deshmukh 2
1 urbansensors.com, San Francisco, USA
2 Rocky Mountain Institute, Boulder, CO, USA

EcoIsland: A System for Persuading Users to Reduce CO2 Emissions
Chihiro Takayama 1, Vili Lehdonvirta 2
1 Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
2 Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland