faulker038

. I attended workshop in Siegen, Germany on "Solutions for Economics, Environment and Democracy" (SEED) one week ago. The workshop was organized by professors Lance Bennet (political science) and  Alan Borning (computer science) from the University of Washington together with  Markus Rohde (HCI), and Volker Wulf (HCI) from Siegen University. Around 40 persons had been invited and all expenses were paid except for traveling to and from Siegen. One important reason for me to go was the people who organized it, I for example met Lance Bennett when he was a guest professor in Stockholm in 2010 and haven't met him since. Also I knew that Bonnie Nardi and Six Silberman (that I got to know during  my 2014 sabbatical at UC Irvine ) would attend the workshop and that was also a powerful attractor for me. The workshop had been preceded by a much smaller workshop that was organized as part of the 8th conference on Communities & Technologies  (C&T) in Troyes, France...

. This past week we organized an After Work  where we invited companies and other organizations with an interest in 1) ICT/digitalization and 2) sustainability. The basic idea of organizing this event is: - Our students do their master’s thesis during the spring (January – June 2018). They are good at what they do. - Companies/organisations have tasks that would be suitable and we want to find sustainability-oriented tasks/thesis topics for our students. - Companies/organisations do now necessarily know what tasks are suitable for our students, how to formulate a proposal to make it attractive for our students nor know how to get in touch with our students. - So we (teaches/researchers) organize an after work where we tell them about these things and encourage/help them formulate suitable and attractive thesis topics. A side effect or organizing this event is of course that we widen our general network (beyond the specific task of together defining master's thesis topics).  We...

. 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 15th - is "The Future of Work/Work of the Future". Last year's theme was "The Future of Computer Games/Computer Games of the Future". I wrote a blog post about the course when it started seven weeks ago. Since the theme is changed every year, it's basically a brand new course every year. More specifically, there are only a few changes in the format - but all the content is replaced. That means there's a lot of work to do every year. This year is special for a specific reason - this is the very last year the course will be given. We started up a new master's program in "interactive media technologies" last year and this course isn't part of tha...

. I attended the Energy Agency's (final) conference in the program "Energy, IT and Design" (EID) this past week and the theme for this year's conference was "Design for an energy efficient everyday life". I will cover the program shortly and will write more in depth about a few things that I found notable and/or interesting. I wrote a blog post about last year's conference and  you can find it here . The day started with a talk by Mari Broman who is an industry representative and a member of the program's steering committee. She is also someone who has followed the whole 10-year long program from start to finish. Mari framed the program, discussed its development over time and then described the three phases of the program (2005-2008, 2009-2013 and 2014-2017) in terms of moving from a focus on technology to a bigger emphasis on consumers, on design, on visualization, on everyday use of products and services and on lifestyles. The third and last phase...

. This past week I submitted a paper about e-sports to a special issue on " The emergence of e-sports: Challenges and Opportunities " in the journal " Sport, Ethics, and Philosophy ". The article is written by me and  Daniel Svensson  (Chalmers University of Technology). The origins of the paper is an unpublished paper we presented at a cultural studies conference no less than four years ago. I actually  published a blog post with the exact same title  back then. The draft paper has languished for quite some time since the right opportunity has never presented itself. Also, I have not pursued research on e-sports and my co-author was busy with his ph.d. thesis which he defended in December 2016 (" Scientizing performance in endurance sports: The emergence of ‘rational training’ in cross-country skiing, 1930-1980 "). The fact that he is now finished, together with increasing academic interest in e-sports, has made us a bit more alert about publishing opport...

. This past week I submitted a paper to the largest conference in my area,  CHI  (" The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction "). Since the conference is peer reviewed (double-blind), I can not divulge the title of the paper nor indeed anything about the contents, but, I can say that the paper (for once) has little to do with "sustainability" and all the more to do with "design". Even though I can't say anything about the contents of the paper, I can say a few things about my co-authors and how the paper came about. It all started when I invited  Staffan Björk  (professor of interaction design at Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University) to give a guest lecture in my course last year. I thought the lecture was  fantastically  interesting and we decided to meet up and discuss/evaluate the possibility of writing a spin-off paper together durin...

. My first-ever article that is not about computing has just been published (it's about peak oil and sustainability). The publisher (Elsevier) informs me that the article is publicly available for free for for everyone for 50 days (until November 7) if you follow this link . The article will unfortunately not be available under open access after that since there is no research project that backs it up (and that could pay the fees for setting the article free). I should at some point also closely read  Elsevier's sharing policy . The article, " What if there had only been half the oil? Rewriting history to envision the consequences of peak oil " is an exercise in contrafactual history ("what if...?") and it is written by  Daniel Pargman , Elina Eriksson , Mikael Höök , Joshua Tanenbaum , Marcel Pufal and Josefin Wangel . Since this is a strange bird - it's not every day you get an article about contrafactual history published in a reputable academic jou...