A lot of voices when they’re not in unison are just noise, but when they are in unison they can be a chorus.
Beth Karlin is director of the Transformational Media Lab within the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at University of California Irvine.
We talk about social action campaigns, documentary, using new information and communication technology to understand and empower environmental change, and what we can learn from psychological perspectives in communication research.
Dr Dawna Ballard is from the University of Texas. She studies how our working lives shape our experience of time in multiple ways, both personally and professionally. She tells us the industrialisation of time, with effects including fast-paced work environments, multi-tasking, long-term planning, and time-management issues. Noting the basis of sustainability as ethics extended over time and space, we talk about the construction and representation of time as a vehicle for our lives.
Juliet Norton is based at the University of Central Florida. She describes herself as a “grounded technologist”. Her proposal for support for domestic plant guilds is a novel application of sustainable computing.
Dr Lisa Nathan is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (the iSchool@UBC). Lisa’s research is motivated by the high potential for interactions with information systems to have a long-term influence on the human condition. In this interview she tells us a bit of her background and then something of her research. Through a range of projects she investigates theory and method for designing information systems that address societal challenges, specifically those that are ethically charged and impact multiple generations (e.g., sustainability, colonialism, genocide), and information practices that develop and adapt as we use these systems.
This talk ranges from sailing in the Caribbean to genocide in Rwanda, and back again.
Six Silberman. Wow. This is an insight packed interview.
Currently based in New York, Six works at the intersection of art, economics, design, computing, business, sociology (this list goes on). He has come around to describing himself as a systems analyst. This extended interview traverses full cost accounting for the life cycle, our fetish for growth, the search for frameworks for thinking bigger, power relationships, working collaboratively, creating space for reflection, the role of business in society, and the probability that we are at the start of an n-dip recession as parts of a collapse (he is a co-author on an award winning paper Collapse Informatics).
Six asks how we get back to a place where we recognise the importance of managing things we fundamentally cannot measure? We discuss the importance of systems thinking and ponder whether sustainability can be considered an emergent phenomena. Finally Six tells us his plans for connecting large scale discussions of sustainability to things we can actually do.
Stefan Kreitmayer is from both the Open University’s Centre for Research in Computing and University College London’s Interaction Centre. Stefan has a varied background developing interactive and reactive computer graphics for live performances and installations in collaboration with composers, directors, designers, and choreographers. Earlier activities included film music and sound design. Stefan tells us how this background led to the development of the 4decades simulation game. 4Decades is a game developed to enable large groups to explore and critique scientific models of global climate economics. It is based on a real-time dynamic simulation that teams interact with via distributed tablets and public displays.
Dr Gilly Leshed and Dr Maria HÃ¥kansson are from Cornell University. They are exploring the how individuals and groups accomplish tasks and socialize and the roles technology plays in these interactions. Here they talk about their backgrounds and a farm family study which is funded by Nokia through the Nokia University Cooperation Fund.
Professor Bill Tomlinson is Director of the Social Code Group at the University of California Irvine. Author of
Greening through IT, Bill is the lead author on Collapse Informatics which recently won the CCC Sustainability Award.
Dr John C Thomas is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the development of Human Computer Interaction since the early 1970s. Most recently he helps lead the people side of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative. He was also a leader in the application of design patterns to computing.
In this web-only feature recorded at CHI2011 by Samuel Mann, John explores how patterns might provide a framework for developing sustainable solutions.
Some related resources:
Conference paper from IBM’s Sharon Nunes focussing on smart water “Not just because ‘we can’…but because ‘we must'”
John Thomas’s “Who Speaks for wolf?” pattern.
Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language
Mary Barreto works with the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute: a collaboration between the University of Madeira, founded by the University of Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mary is with the SINAIS project, the Sustainable Interaction with social Networks, context Awareness and Innovative Services.
In this web-only feature recorded at CHI2011, Mary talks with Samuel Mann about the ideas from her paper on social translucence.
Dr Olaf Schroth works for the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. CALP focuses on accessible solutions that bridge research and practice by bringing rigorous science and modeling, visualizations, innovative environmental design and participatory processes to community and landscape planning.
In this extended interview Olaf talks with Samuel Mann about participatory collaborative planning through visualisation.
Dr Juan Pablo Hourcade from the University of Iowa is the passion behind the hciforpeace.org. In this fascinating interview he describes how this community is using computing technologies to promote peace and prevent conflict.
Shane’s number of the week: 1.5.  UN’s climate chief, Christina Figueres argues that the world should be aiming to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius, rather than the weaker 2 degrees.
