research « IT goes Green

Archive for the ‘research’ Category

smart meters with intent

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Design with Intent: Smart meter design consultation. Chance to get involved; June 18th, 2009

Design with Intent: Smart meters. Some thoughts from a design point of view; June 18th, 2009

Dan Lockton’s research is about design intended to influence users’ behaviour; he called it “Design with Intent”. The whole theme is interesting in terms of sustainable design, both for what concerns inducted responsibile behaviours and the transmission of knowledge itself; sure it will be deepened in further posts.
Here, a couple of specific articles are presented as an example of approch to Design with Intent.

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Tags: accessibility and knowledge, energy cycles
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public green data

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

www.open-io.org

Open IO is a free public resource for estimating the sustainability of products and services. The data available on the website have been developed for everyone to use for any purpose and at no cost.
The team from Open IO welcomes others to join their community: “Collaboration with companies and researchers in new data development efforts are our cup of tea and we would also love to hear your feedback. Our model is built for continual improvement and we will keep working hard to enhance our resources that aim to provide the public with the best available free, open and transparent sustainability related information possible”.
Also, data are (almost) ready to be imported into openLCA (and SimaPro, which on his turn is neither free, nor open source) to be used as a Life Cycle Library.

EcoMo09

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

ecomo09.eventbrite.com

www.betavine.net/bvportal/community/sustainability

EcoMo09 is an event which took place in London the past September, 11th at 6:00 PM to 12th at 6:00 PM. It was open to all software developers who wanted to have a positive impact on society and the environment. Wi-Fi and power on location were provided, while laptops, software development kits and any other tools were to be brought by the participants.
Vodafone and Betavine organized the event, a 24-hour dev camp competition. Workshops on environmental data sources took place during the event, and developers used their “green” coding skills to create prototype software tools to help people reduce their impact on the environment. EcoMo09 was also intended to offer opportunities to socialise, collaborate and network with code peers.

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Tags: accessibility and knowledge, energy cycles, material cycles
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google’s ethics

Monday, July 6th, 2009

www.google.org

blog.google.org

In 2004, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote to prospective shareholders about their vision for the company, they outlined a commitment to contribute significant resources, including 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form, as well as employee time, to address some of the world’s most urgent problems. That commitment became Google.org.

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Tags: energy cycles, health and safety
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open knowledge

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

academicearth.org

academicearth.org/about

Academic Earth is an organization founded by Richard Ludlow, with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? Academic Earth’s team is working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

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Tags: accessibility and knowledge
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memes and temes

Monday, June 29th, 2009

A meme is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in “The Selfish Gene” (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
The following are two videos dealing with memetics, which also present considerations about informatics, technology and human development.

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Tags: accessibility and knowledge
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Design Open Source

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

dos.politecalab.org
(Italian only)

Which are the open codes of design practice? How can hardware be opened, together with software? How should a collective design be faced, when based on sharing and collaboration? “Design Open Source” workshops analyze design implications connected to the concept of openness, within the systemic paradigm. Such an analysis begins with technologies as a resource and goes further, beyond the technical aspects of the problem.

Tags: accessibility and knowledge, material cycles
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