Limits
Computing in a finite and faltering world.
I don’t know how the Limits conference escaped my attention for seven years, but I just discovered it through the fediverse (naturally), and I am happier for it. Its focus is on the ecological, material, energetic, and societal limits and impacts of computing, both present and future, and that seems more important than ever.
This paper, for example, from the 2022 program, Strategies for Degrowth Computing, immediately catches my attention. So does this one from last year’s program, ‘This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT. The website in question is one I am well aware of, and the DIY solar-hosting setup is something I aim to try, eventually. And this paper, too, Breaking the Cornucopian Paradigm: Towards Moderate Internet Use in Everyday Life, looks like something everyone should read.
I tried pushing the idea of green content strategy as a topic to explore collaboratively with peers in 2015, but nobody seemed interested in pursuing it. Maybe they didn’t see the relevance, or the point, or really know how to approach it in a field saturated by content marketing and big tech. But it certainly seemed like an obvious topic for investigation to me.
I still think the concepts of degrowth, permacomputing, and so forth are important facets of any company’s content strategy—yes, even content marketing. Somebody in those business-oriented content domains will jump on the moral-imperative of degrowth eventually, crowing loudly and beating their wings like pioneers of the idea.
Collapse OS seems like a project and topic that fits right in with the Limits community’s interests, but I saw no paper yet suggesting a connection. If readers know of other topics or initiatives not accounted for by any Limits papers, please drop me a line with a link. I am curious. I doubtfully will have anything to submit to Limits myself, but I would be happy to help someone with editing a proposal.
In any case, the Limits community was and is all over such ideas, and it slipped right by me. There are other papers in past Limits years, and I recommend perusing their programs from the Limits website, but I have marked the following as first papers I will catch up on this summer.
From 2015:
- Collapse (and Other Futures) Software Engineering
- Computing Efficiency, Sufficiency, and Self-sufficiency: A Model for Sustainability?
- Limits and Sustainable Interaction Design: Obsolescence in a Future of Collapse and Resource Scarcity
- Inequality and Limits
- Understanding the Limits of Competitive Processes
From 2016:
- A Circular Commons for Digital Devices
- A Report from an Online Course on Global Disruption and Information Technology
- Limits to the Sharing Economy
- Situating Shelter Design and Provision in ICT Discourse for Scarce-resource Contexts
Papers from years 2017 and 2018 are not linked up in the programs, but presumably they are open access somewhere. I will loop back through these another day.
From 2019:
- Who Breathes the Smoke? Technologies for Community-Based Natural Resource Management
- The Lions’ Gate: Towards a Permaculture-inspired Blended Space
- The High Cost of Free Services: Problems with Surveillance Capitalism for IT Infrastructure and Possible Alternatives
- Should Do, Can Do, Can Know: Sustainability and Other Reflections on One Hundred and One Interaction Design Projects
- Breaking the Cornucopian Paradigm: Towards Moderate Internet Use in Everyday Life
- Sustainable Platform Cooperativism: Towards social and environmental justice in the future of the gig-economy
From 2020:
- Diminishing space: peer-to-peer sharing as a transition practice
- Towards a World of Fixers: Examining barriers and enablers of widely deployed third-party repair for computing within limits
- The app is not where the action is – discussing features of an internal communication system for a permaculture village
- Skill rebound: On an unintended effect of digitalization
- Hasten Slowly: Developing an interactive sustainability storytelling chair
- From Moore’s Law to the Carbon Law
From 2021:
- HCI’s Role in the Capitalocene – Lessons Learned from an HCI Master Course Across the Globe
- How Sustainable is the Smart Farm?
- Circular digital devices: lessons about the social and planetary boundaries
- ‘This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT
- Transition Discourse, Food, and Computing within Limits
From 2022:
- Calculate the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Beyond the Myth of Efficiency
- The Richness of Designing for Eco-Social Change: Creative Practice, Transformative Futures and Living within Limits
- Photovoltaic Imagination: Solar Strategies for Community Integrated Research and Graduate Training
- Conceptualising Resources-aware Higher Education Digital Infrastructure through Self-hosting: a Multi-disciplinary View
- Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design
- On the environmental sustainability of AI art(s)
- Sustaining Security and Safety in ICT: A Quest for Terminology, Objectives, and Limits
Again, these are not all the Limits papers, but the above lists reflect papers I am inclined to read first. Cherry picking as I go, of course.
Wondering about comments?