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Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
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TY - GEN
T1 - Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts
T2 - Relating Systems Thinking and Design
AU - Smith, Marcia Tavares
AU - Knowles, Bran
AU - Widdicks, Kelly
AU - Blair, Gordon
AU - Samuel, Gabrielle
AU - Jirotka, Marina
AU - Lucivero, Federica
AU - Ten Holter, Carolyn
AU - Somavilla, Lucas
N1 - Conference code: 12
PY - 2024/4/30
Y1 - 2024/4/30
N2 - The carbon footprint of the world’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is growing at an alarming rate, giving rise to calls for tools and methodologies for reporting on carbon emissions towards greater accountability within the sector. Accurately calculating the emissions of digital technologies is a complex task where there are no clear standards for methodologies or boundaries for what should be included in these calculations. Nevertheless, a number of online carbon calculators exist to quantify carbon emissions of ICT. The starting question in this paper is how much such tools can inform and provide insight to people working with ICT innovation to take action to reduce the environmental impacts from the products, services and systems they create. To explore this question, we analyse ICT carbon calculators from a digital innovation designer's perspective, exploring what they enable thosecreating ICT to see and understand, as well as the limitations of these views on carbon. We argue that these approaches are limited and that a better way to address the issue is by moving from designing carbon calculators to codesigning a framework for responsible innovation that enables systems thinking, exposes complexities, helps with the assessment of carbon emissions without fixating on numbers, and supports evaluation and visualisation of future scenarios.
AB - The carbon footprint of the world’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is growing at an alarming rate, giving rise to calls for tools and methodologies for reporting on carbon emissions towards greater accountability within the sector. Accurately calculating the emissions of digital technologies is a complex task where there are no clear standards for methodologies or boundaries for what should be included in these calculations. Nevertheless, a number of online carbon calculators exist to quantify carbon emissions of ICT. The starting question in this paper is how much such tools can inform and provide insight to people working with ICT innovation to take action to reduce the environmental impacts from the products, services and systems they create. To explore this question, we analyse ICT carbon calculators from a digital innovation designer's perspective, exploring what they enable thosecreating ICT to see and understand, as well as the limitations of these views on carbon. We argue that these approaches are limited and that a better way to address the issue is by moving from designing carbon calculators to codesigning a framework for responsible innovation that enables systems thinking, exposes complexities, helps with the assessment of carbon emissions without fixating on numbers, and supports evaluation and visualisation of future scenarios.
KW - sustainability
KW - climate change
KW - carbon emissions accounting
KW - digital technology
KW - responsible innovation
KW - co-design
KW - systemic design
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
T3 - RSD 12
BT - Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD12
PB - Systemic Design Association
CY - Tønsberg, Norway
Y2 - 6 October 2023 through 20 October 2023
ER -