It has been almost a year since I started this blog. The first year of my phd studies have gone faster than expected and the time for blogging a bit more scarce than I would have liked it to be. I wrote 47 articles, but I think I have as many as drafts or ideas I know I should have written about.

During this year there where around 1300 visits, which is probably more than I expected specially with the low frequency of writing. So thank you to all that have been here! Please comment if you would like to see some concrete improvement.

Now I’m taking a month break, getting married and enjoying the summer. The blog will be back in August with renewed energy and new posts!

The paper written together with Daniel Spikol at CeLeKT has been accepted at Mobile Human Computer Interaction 2009 in the workshop on Sharing Experiences with Social Mobile Media.

Here is the abstract:

We have a personal relationship with mobile phones, since they are closer to us than any other technological device. They are ubiquitous (60% of the world population owns one), individual, and pervasive through our lifestyle (we have them with us all the time and everywhere). These modern devices are nearly as powerful as personal computers, always connected to Internet and loaded with sensors like GPS and accelerometers. These mobile devices offer the opportunity to persuade users to change attitudes and behaviors towards personal health and environmental issues. For this paper we will focus on the design of a mobile application for reducing in carbon dioxide emissions, using the definition of “Climate Persuasive Services” that can change personal attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change for reducing greenhouse gases emissions. The paper presents design practices that have resulted in a prototype mobile application.

I will post the pdf soon.

The paper I presented at Persuasive 2009 is now available for download as PDF at ACM. Please have a look at it!

Here is the abstract:

ICT has reshaped our society, and with the current accelerating development of technology, and its wider distribution throughout the globe, they will continue doing so even more. These changes in society are important for sustainability. They affect the physical way the society and the environment interact, but they also affect the way people think, learn and behave.

We suggest that the persuasive power of ICT can be oriented towards climate change. For this purpose we define the concept of “climate persuasive services” as ICT applications that change personal attitudes regarding climate change and/or change behavior towards reducing greenhouse gases emissions. We consider mobile phones, pervasive sensors and social media as three key technological drivers for the development of climate persuasion applications.

We have analyzed the use of persuasion principles in existing web and mobile applications forming three clusters: tracking carbon footprints, sharing goals and making green behavior easier. Based on this analysis, we suggest a more planned use of persuasive principles, and propose six different opportunities for improvement.

David Wolman wrote an article in Wired about how we should get rid of physical cash and just use digital money. I have always wondered why we don’t accelerate the dematerialization of the micro-payments. This is happening in places as Japan and Korea, and at a growing rate in african countries where previously ad-hoc mobile banking solutions have become a primer way of economic exchange. In the western countries it seems that we are still attached to our heavy euro coins and thick dollar wads.

From the environmental perspective, using mobile phones, RFID, smart cards.. we could save energy and materials in both production, storage and transportation of money. However a good life cycle analysis would be needed to actually estimate the real savings and see if there is any rebound effect that would be needed to be minimized.

Illustration: Stephen Doyle for Wired

I always mention the possibility of ICT for revealing invisible data as energy, CO2 emissions, environmental impact… to the consumers.

But one risk of ICT is that it works also in the other direction, hiding environmental impacts and processes behind a web façade. One example I experienced recently was when I ordered postcards from Moo (from where I used to get my visit cards sent from London) and I discovered that the package was sent “par air” from New Zealand. For the consumer this process is completely opaque and there was no way for me to know that my postcards would fly half world to arrive in my postbox.

We need to think of ways of minimizing this, how do we provide consumers transparent information about the products they are buying? How do we make people to care of that information?

Amazon has presented a 9.7″ e-reader, an optimal size for reading PDF documents and newspapers / magazines.

Of course, as the smaller Kindle, it cannot be connected to a computer and rely on the wireless network to get the documents. And working in USA only. So I still do not see it as a solution for researchers / professionals.

More on my opinions on the future of reading.

I’ve been at Berkeley today, and I’m now sitting at a Café, drinking a capuccino and working with my laptop, surrounded with students doing the same as it’s pouring outside. Nice atmosphere. I’ll make a short resume of the meetings:

I met first with Tapan Parikh from the School of Information, when we discussed around ICT and sustainable development and I got to know more about the work they are doing around ICT for Development. I also participated in the seminar about ICTD when a the plans about researching the impact of mobile phones in Rwanda in prices, wages and in mitigating economical shocks and crisis  was presented, interesting work going on there! I’m seriously thinking that we need to change focus to developing countries, or at least have some more work on it.

Then I met with Eric Hallstein (Energy and Resources Group), Graham Bullock, and Avery Cohn (Department of Environmental Science, Policies, and Management), that are working at the Infolab, researching the use of technologies to create and provide environmental and health information to the consumers, how that impacts their behavior and developing tools to do it in the best way. One of the projects that they were part of is Good Guide, which now  they are using as data source. We had a lot of research areas / questions in common, and it was giving to discuss with them around different ideas. It would be good to have more contact with them.

The picture is actually from the Muir Woods, I couldn’t take pictures of the nice campus here as it’s raining heavily, but they had a creek and some impresing redwoods too here.

Persuasive 2009 is now over, and it’s time for reflections.

The speakers and keynotes were really interesting, and there were three intense days getting in information.

One inspiring presentation was by B.J. Fogg where he suggested a eight step design process for persuasive applications.

The main message was to start small, to do not overdo interventions trying to do everything the first time.

Pick a simple behavior that you’re able to measure and create an application that try to change it, then if it success, grow (by repeating, replicating to another behavior, make the behavior harder, scale to more people…). Do fast iterations, a bit agile style, or getting real.

He also presented a quite simplified view of where to “attack” using persuasion: First try to trigger the behavior, if it doesn’t work look if the behavior needs to be simplified, and if not, go back to increasing the motivation.

Now I’m in San Francisco for some days, I’ll keep posting some more reflections about the conference these days.

I’m presenting a paper in the Persuasion 2009 conference at Claremont, the city of trees and PhDs.

I just have arrived today after a 20 hours trip and 1 ton extra carbon dioxide to my account. The city is very cozy and the hotel Casa 425 looks terrific.

The conference will start tomorrow and I will present on Tuesday. I will both update my twitter and blog during these days to keep you informed.

After the conference I will go to San Francisco (U.C. Berkeley) and Los Angeles (UCLA)

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An interesting white paper from Ericsson, about how to achieve energy-efficient, sustainable mobile communications through network optimization, site optimization and alternative energy sources.

Ericsson projects regarding sustainability includes the use of renewable energy for both network equipment and also some other small projects as solar power mobile chargers.

One example is with China Mobile, running 252 wind and solar sites in Inner Mongolia. Photo from Ericsson.

Solar powered mobile charger. Photo from Ericsson.

In my opinion, this type of work is a good example of the relation between ICT and Sustainable Development, both by:

+ ICTD: Providing connectivity in developing rural areas, closing the digital divide.

+ Green IT: Reducing the environmental impact of  ICT infrastructure.