faulker038

. I read the three books below just about a year ago, between mid-December 2015 and January 2016. They all treat the topic of the commons, e.g. the space beyond market and state that many of us nowadays can't even see . It shouldn't be too hard for Swedes to get it though since we still have " Allmansrätten " ( "everyman's right" or "the freedom to roam" ). The freedom to roam is not quite as strong as the idea of the commons were back in the days, but it still goes a long way compared to the privatized regimes in many other countries in the world. All three books below discuss the relevance of the commons (greater than ever) and the applicability of the concept (lots of structural barriers, not the least mental).  To be honest, it felt hard to write this blog post since it feels like a lot of time has passed since I read these books. The asterisks below represent the number of quotes from the each book (see further below) and here's the pr...

. I just submitted a position paper to a workshop at the upcoming (May 2017) CHI conference , " Designing Sustainable Food Systems " - also known as FoodCHI. Here's the short description of the workshop: "The FoodCHI workshop will ... discuss ... how we can create sustainable food systems, and how we may design technologies for a sustainable food system. There are three goals for this workshop: - Exploring the roles and implications of information technologies on and in a sustainable food system. - Designing techniques and adapting design paradigms to specific components of a sustainable food system. - Reflecting on the landscape of design work and core opportunities for design within a sustainable food system." The (really really short) position paper we submitted was written by me, master's student Sofie Nyström and my colleague Cecilia Katzeff and the title of the paper is " Waste reduction in the Sustainable Grocery Store ". The position paper ...

. I wrote a blog post at the end of June where I announced mine and Elina's then-upcoming ph.d. course DM3606 ICT and Sustainability. The course was held during the autumn term (September-December) and we had our final session this past week. The examination consisted of writing a course paper and we spent the final session presenting and discussing these papers. Back in June, when we announced the course, we thought a lot of (perhaps reluctant) computer science ph.d.'s would sign up for the course not necessarily because they wanted to but because they kind of have to, but that message hadn't reached those students yet. Also, the actual call got stuck and we only found out after the summer (mid-August) that the invitation had in fact not been distributed before the summer (June). That meant that we were unsure if we would be able to give the course when it was supposed to start (August 25) but we did in the end get enough students together. These are the ph.d. students wh...

. Paying real money to buy virtual loot boxes inside a computer game. I wrote a blog post three months ago about a proposed paper (abstract) that me and my colleague Björn Hedin submitted to the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ACSA) 2017 Workshop “ Unnecessary, Unwanted and Uncalled-for: A Workshop on Uselessness ”. The abstract was accepted back then and me and Björn spent a few sessions in November-December hashing out the core ideas of the paper and the basic flow of the argument. It was in fact pure joy to spend time brainstorming these ideas and the results that came out of this process was very unexpected and, frankly, slightly disturbing. We're not sure what to make of it or even if we have drawn the right conclusions after having followed a train of thoughts to its logical conclusion - so it will be a great paper to discuss at the workshop! We converted our notes from December into running text that we submitted last week - a 3500-word workshop paper about the sust...

. I'm part of a group (led by University of Strathclyde) that handed in a EU application two weeks ago. This is a " Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks " application and I took part of another such application two years ago. If granted, the project will run for four years and the application basically applies for money to hire 14 ph.d. students for three years at five universities and three research institutes/research-oriented organisations in five different countries (UK, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Greece). There are also an additional 11 partner organisations in for the most part the same five countries. Now as well as in the previous application the KTH "node" consists of Cecilia Katzeff and me, but this time around I hardly did any work at all with the application itself. This short description of the application is for the most part taken from the application itself: The application is called " Smart home technology for sustainable practices ...

. I just came back to work this week after a long vacation and BAM, work started immediately and at full pace. The main thing that happened this past week was that mine and Elina's brand new course, "DM2720  Sustainable ICT in practice " started (Hanna Hasselqvist has also been part of planning the course and her pre-ph.d. experiences as an engineering student at Chalmers and later as a consultant have been very valuable). This course of course starts right where our previous course (that we taught up until just before Christmas) finished, and the vast majority of students (80+%) who take the new course also just took the previous course. While that course was more theoretical and geared towards discussions, this course is more practical and geared towards current industry practices and "what industry wants" from students who have a competence in media technology/computer science and sustainability. The main thing that distinguishes the new course from other ...

. My two previous blog posts have treated two abstracts (proposed articles) to a special issue on "Energy and the Future" in the journal Energy Research & Social Science  and this blog post treats the third and last abstract I submitted, this time together with my colleague  [TEMPORARILY ANONYMIZED] . This abstract is again directed towards the special issue theme "Ways of thinking about the future of energy" and I think it's a pretty certain bet that not all three of these proposed articles will be invited to the special issue... I would be happy if one is accepted and I would be delighted but overworked if two are accepted (luckily I'm the second rather than the first author of all three proposals)... For a little more information about the special issue (and the five themes), see the previous blog post . The background to this blog post is to some extend many long free-ranging discussions between me and  [TEMPORARILY ANONYMIZED]  about energy and othe...