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.

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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OLPC, originally uploaded by It’s a mobile world.

I have loaned a olpc from marko.
I will post soon my thougts about it.

I am working at GlobalFOCUS (a project of WWF looking at gloabl action for climate change), looking at how ICT can be used both for communicating sustainability and for working and collaborating globally with low carbon impact.

One project they did at GlobalFOCUS last summer was a movie competition at the Chinese University of Communication, where the media students interpreted climate change and environmental problems in video format. I uploaded those videos in youTube this week, part of the work of using blogs and social media for increasing awereness and widespreading their projects.

Here are some selected finalist, really good quality! spend some time and watch them, completly worth it!

Via Engadget

Blogging workshop, originally uploaded by It’s a mobile world.

At global focus

I was interviewed for the student newspaper Femte Statsmakten (2009/01, page 39) about sustainability and the media.
Some ideas about e-paper, dematerialization, behavioral change, new media, digital divide…

In PDF (Swedish)