faulker038

. I just came home from the 9th NordiCHI conference in Gothenburg. I will write a blog post about the conference itself, but this blog post is about the Monday October 24 pre-conference workshop that Elina Eriksson and I organised together with Oliver Bates (Lancaster University, UK), Maria Normark (Södertörn University), Jan Gulliksen (KTH), Mikael Anneroth (Ericsson Research) and Johan Berndtsson ( inUse ). The name of the workshop was " HCI and UN's Sustainable Development Goals : Responsibilities, Barriers and Opportunities " and all of the seven organizers attended the workshop with the exception of Johan who was replaced by his colleague Ingrid Domingues at the very last minute. The workshop has a webpage/blog of its own and I also wrote a blog post  about the workshop back in June when we wanted people to sign up for attending it. Here's the timeline and the background as to how we came to organize it: - February/March: Oliver Bates and Maria Normark s...

. In my previous blog post  I wrote about an abstract Leif Dahlberg and me submitted to  a workshop on "uselessness"  last week. Well, I actually submitted  another  abstract to the same workshop together with my colleague Björn Hedin, " Useless games for a sustainable world ". Our main idea is that virtual badges that you buy for money inside a computer game perhaps can be seen  both  as a waste of money  and  as an environmental boon since you spend money on things that have a very small environmental (materials) footprint. I wrote that the call for papers was great in my last blog post. Here are a few short excerpts from the cfp: "For a person or object to be useless, means it does not serve its intended, or any other, purpose. ... When something turns out to be useless, it has failed intrinsically. The inherent negativity of uselessness is directly linked to a supposed obligation for everything and everyone to be useful, at all times, eve...

. A call for papers (cfp) for a workshop on "Uselessness" was circulated at my department some time ago. The full name of the workshop is actually " Unnecessary, Unwanted and Uncalled-for: A Workshop on Uselessness " and I believe  the cfp might very well be the best-written cfp I have ever read . It's almost impossible to 1) have a pulse, 2) be researcher and 3) not have ideas go off like fireworks in your brain when you read it. I can very much recommend that you read it! The cfp was sent by my colleague Leif Dahlberg and I thought it represented an opportunity to (for the first time ever) write something together with him and the result is (at this point) a 300-word abstract, "“ I have no use for useless PhDs”: Interrogating the notion of uselessness in techno-scientific culture ". We will find out already 10 days from now if we are invited to the workshop and we are then expected to submit a paper by January 15. That paper will be circulated among ...

. I went to the annual  KTH Sustainability Research Day  yesterday (just as I attended and blogged about last year's event ). The event (13-17) was fully booked (300 persons) so I think it has to be considered a huge success already before the vice chancellor with responsibility for sustainability, Göran Finnveden, opened up the event by welcoming the attendants. The (half) day was divided into two parts where the first part consisted of traditional plenary talks. I especially liked the very first speaker, Mikael Karlsson , who talked about the relationship between science/scientist and politics/politicians, media/journalists or more generally about the relationship between research and surrounding society based on a recent report that Eva Alfredsson and he had written ( news article , morning newspaper debate article ,  the report (pdf) ). Here's how the summary of the report starts: "This report is originally written as a decision support document for the Swedish All Pa...

. The first part of the project course I'm teaching,  DM2571  "Future of Media", came to an end this past week and we are now moving from the start-up phase (with lots of guest lectures) to the project phase. We change the theme in the course every year and this year's theme - the 14th - is " The Future of Computer Games /Computer Games of the Future". Last year's theme was " The Future of Storytelling / Storytelling of the Future " and the year before that we worked with " The Future of the digital commons and the sharing economy ". Since we change the theme every year, we basically also give a new course every year. More specifically, we make few changes in the format, but we replace all the content. That means there's a lot of work for us teachers every year. This year is special due to two reasons: 1) We have shelved our old master's program and started a new - and this course isn't in it. That ought to mean this is t...

. This blog post is written during a lull in my activities; a lot is happening right now but nothing has come to fruition during the very last few days so I will do something I have never done before and that is to write a little about the current tasks I perform on my job (my work load), about upcoming deadlines and about upcoming blog posts (the latter two go together). This blog post will also be a blueprint for me during the following month as I will also outline what I will publish during the next 30 days (from Sunday October 16 to Sunday November 13). I will below write as if I know the exact date when blog posts will be published, but the text below should be regarded as my (current) plan rather than as an explicit promise. If I write two blog posts per week (usually Wednesday/Thursday and Sunday), I would publish blog posts #1 to #9 during the period in question (October 16 - November 13). - I haven't yet written anything about the course I have been teaching that started o...

. I am hired and I work at the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design ( MID ) at KTH, but I am also affiliated with -  and as of six months physically sit at  - a research center called Center for Sustainable Communications ( CESC ). It's just one floor below my colleagues at MID and I can sneak up in a minute. The move (new location, new colleagues, new types of conversations around the lunch table and at coffee breaks) has been invigorating as it offers me the chance to establish new connections to people as well as the opportunity to have new ideas. At some point during the spring, I must have talked about this at a coffee break and my colleague Cecilia Katzeff turned out to be really interested. I more specifically talked about a slim book I have read (and re-read, and leafed through several times) during the last 10 years, Gunnar Törnqvist's (2004) ” Kreativitetens geografi ” [Geography of creativity]. Me and Cecilia (and others) started wondering if there ...

. I read the three books below in December last year (e.g. 10 months ago). All three books below are about rules and (over)administration running amok, smothering that which it was originally supposed to support. All three books have been influential in shaping my thinking and some of the thoughts go very well together with the ideas that Barath Raghavan and I wrote about in our paper " Refactoring Society : Systems Complexity in an Age of Limits ". We presented that paper in June 2016 at the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits ( LIMITS 2016 ). The ideas and perspectives in these books have also made a strong showing in blog posts such as " MID department retreat and reflections of organisation " (June 2016) and " Open letter to my dean - spare us from excessive administration!" (August 2016). The asterisks below represent the number of quotes from the each book (see further below) and  here's the previous blog post about books I have read. **...