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The international treaty known as the Paris Agreement requires global greenhouse gas emissions to decrease at a pace that will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Given the pressure on all sectors to reduce their emissions to meet this target, the ICT sector must begin to explore how to innovate under constraint for the first time. This could mean facing the unprecedented dilemma of having to choose between innovations, in which case the community will need to develop processes for making collective decisions regarding which innovations are most deserving of their carbon costs. In this paper, we expose tensions in collaboratively prioritising ICT innovation under constraints, and discuss the considerations and approaches the ICT sector may require to make such decisions effectively across the sector. This opens up a new area of research where we envision HCI expertise can inform and resolve such tensions for values-based and target-led ICT innovation towards a sustainable future.

One of the largest single uses of energy, and in most countries therefore oil and gas, is the heating and cooling of buildings. Much of the built environment we need to decarbonise by 2050 is already built. Adapting this infrastructure is going to be disruptive and expensive, and take time we arguably do not have. The main current approach to limiting this consumption is to try to tightly control the indoor conditions to a given setpoint temperature. But, is there another approach? We have conducted a year-long study of the actual thermal performance of a large non-domestic building. We find that there are three significant socio-technical gaps between the buildings systems’ perception of how the building performs and the temperatures experienced by building users which affect peoples’ comfort and waste energy. In contrast with traditional approaches, we argue for more flexibility and adaptivity in both the policy and and how the building is controlled to address this. We believe that mitigating these gaps and avoiding the wasted energy and associated indirect emissions is a significant opportunity for future ICT for sustainability systems.

A strategy for mitigating the ongoing climate crisis is to reduce global energy consumption; as part of this strategy, digital technologies have been used for building automation and behaviour change interventions. However, while these technologies get invested in and relied upon, there remain questions about their overall effectiveness. Focusing on buildings, as their operation is responsible for around 30% of global energy consumption, this thesis explores the role of digital interventions in realising energy savings through both empirical and literature work. Using the Lancaster University campus as a case study, the thesis presents the results from expert interviews and a longitudinal analysis of energy data from 2016 until 2021, including during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews reveal a tendency among experts to problematise occupant behaviour and to trust data-based automation of energy systems as a key to lowering energy consumption. In contrast, the longitudinal analysis shows relatively few energy savings during COVID-19 lockdown periods, suggesting high building baseload and limited potential of digital interventions. Constituting a well-established set of mechanisms that counteract efficiency savings, the thesis then addresses rebound effects: based on a literature mapping showing that rebound effects have received little attention in energy efficiency research, systems thinking and the combination of efficiency with sufficiency strategies are encouraged. The limitations of digital energy-saving interventions, in particular behaviour change technology, have also been discussed in the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community. A literature review of SHCI critique papers and recent publications uncovers that to overcome these limitations, the community has been called to contribute beyond its HCI skillset. Here, I propose "green policy informatics" as an alternative contribution pathway that is characterised by ambitious climate policies. The thesis conc

The heterogeneity of Deep Learning models, libraries, and hardware poses an important challenge for improving model inference performance. Auto-tuners address this challenge via automatic tensor program optimization towards a target-device. However, auto-tuners incur a substantial time cost to complete given their design necessitates performing tensor program candidate measurements serially within an isolated target-device to minimize latency measurement inaccuracy. In this paper we propose DOPpler, a parallel auto-tuning measurement infrastructure. DOPpler allows for considerable auto-tuning speedup over conventional approaches whilst maintaining high-quality tensor program optimization. DOPpler accelerates the auto-tuning process by proposing a parallel execution engine to efficiently execute candidate tensor programs in parallel across the CPU-host and GPU target-device, and overcomes measurement inaccuracy by introducing a high-precision on-device measurement technique when measuring tensor program kernel latency. DOPpler is designed to automatically calculate the optimal degree of parallelism to provision fast and accurate auto-tuning for different tensor programs, auto-tuners and target-devices. Experiment results show that DOPpler reduces total auto-tuning time by 50.5% on average whilst achieving optimization gains equivalent to conventional auto-tuning infrastructure.

The UK government has committed to reducing its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are high energy users, with the largest proportion of their energy demand for space heating; an area still dominated by carbon-intensive fuels. This research addresses the UK HEI space temperature policy landscape, making direct links between space temperature policy and carbon management, advocating the development of evidence-based policies as a critical tool for reducing carbon emissions within the sector. Sixty-six space temperature policies were reviewed, and five experienced energy managers were interviewed to understand the range, development and use of space temperature policies in UK HEIs. The research identified a lack of consistency across these policies, leading to missed opportunities for making energy and carbon savings. The research highlights gaps in the available data and literature needed to connect policy to its effectiveness, and identifies the use of policy as a defensive tool against complaints rather than an active driver of energy reduction. A series of recommendations are proposed for national and institutional policymakers, suggesting areas for improvement and future research to facilitate effective development and practice in space temperature policy towards net-zero.

Good indoor air quality (IAQ) is critically important for many as- pects of our lives, including as we’ve found recently in reducing the transmission of airborne diseases such as COVID-19. Deliv- ering good IAQ poses several challenges to organisations: it can require changes in working practices, be bounded by infrastructure capabilities such as buildings and their heating and ventilation sys- tems, and result in substantial energy usage. In this study we have conducted a preliminary investigation measuring IAQ in a typical ‘science lab’ classroom, and engaging with stakeholders to jointly explore these data. Our mixed methods approach uncovers an in- door air quality ‘trilemma’, which relates air quality, energy usage, and stakeholder practices that can be mediated by, and understood as, a site for potentially impactful future HCI designs.

The ARINZRIT project focused on mapping the social and cultural factors driving the need for Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) in the UK. From interviews with carefully selected stakeholders, and analysis of the usage data from specific high performance computing resources over the past 10 years, this report highlights how current cultural and academic practices including a lack of policy and tools for decision making are impeding the path to net zero. We offer diagrammatic representations of interacting forces (‘causal loop diagrams’) that show how existing practice leads to growth of DRI and its resulting environmental footprint through inefficiency, redundancy and a confluence of existing processes. We conclude with our recommendations for these stakeholders to address net zero more effectively by stimulating a necessary cultural shift in all areas in response to the climate emergency.

Good indoor air quality (IAQ) is critically important for many as- pects of our lives, including as we’ve found recently in reducing the transmission of airborne diseases such as COVID-19. Deliv- ering good IAQ poses several challenges to organisations: it can require changes in working practices, be bounded by infrastructure capabilities such as buildings and their heating and ventilation sys- tems, and result in substantial energy usage. In this study we have conducted a preliminary investigation measuring IAQ in a typical ‘science lab’ classroom, and engaging with stakeholders to jointly explore these data. Our mixed methods approach uncovers an in- door air quality ‘trilemma’, which relates air quality, energy usage, and stakeholder practices that can be mediated by, and understood as, a site for potentially impactful future HCI designs.

Online food delivery has transformed the last-mile of food and grocery delivery, with unnoticed yet often significant impacts upon the transport and logistics network. This new model of food delivery is not just increasing congestion in urban centers though, it is also changing the contours and qualities of those doing delivery—namely through gig economy work. This new system of food consumption and provision is rapidly gaining traction, but assessments around its current and future sustainability tend to hold separate the notions of social, environmental and economic sustainability—with few to date working to understand how these can interact, influence and be in conflict with one another. This paper seeks to work with this broader understanding of sustainability, whilst also foregrounding the perspectives of gig economy couriers who are often marginalized in such assessments of the online food delivery system. We make use of systems thinking and Campbell’s conflict model of sustainability to do this. In assessing the online food delivery in this way, we seek to not only provide a counternarrative to some of these previous assessments, but to also challenge those proposing the use of gig economy couriers as an environmentally sustainable logistics intervention in other areas of last-mile logistics to consider how this might impact the broader sustainability of their system, now and in the future.