Demand Around the Clock

Abstract

Motivated by mobile devices' growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an account of how data demand has meaning and utility in our participants' social practices, and the timing and relative impacts of these. We then assess the scale of this demand by drawing comparison between our fine-grained observations and a more representative dataset of 398 devices from the Device Analyzer corpus. Our results highlight the significant categories of data demanding practice, and the identification of where changes in app time and duration of use might reduce or shift demand to reduce services' impacts.

Using behavioural data to assess the environmental impact of electricity consumption of alternate television service distribution platforms

“…Here, approaches from Sustainable Interaction Design applied to large-scale systems (Blevis, 2007;Preist et al, 2016;Preist and Shabajee, 2010) can be used. It is also beneficial to understand how such practices interact with the wider set of entertainment and IT practices in the home and their resulting energy impacts (Bates et al, 2014;Lord et al, 2015;Widdicks et al, 2017). Such work, together with scenario analysis, could provide valuable insights resulting in long-term reductions in both cost and environmental impact.…”

Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services

“…Some of this work takes a practice-centric perspective, exploring the variety of practices an individual user develops around the digital services they use and the environmental impact this has. This includes exploring practices associated with tablets [30], mobile devices [64], and larger configurations of equipment [3]. Other work takes a more systems perspective, including exploring the longterm increase in energy use by the internet that results from current trends in user behaviour [20,44], and extending the SID rubric of Blevis to apply to the design of digital services [43].…”

“…This body of work contains a number of proposed interventions to reduce the environmental impact of digital services. These include identifying and eliminating digital waste [44] such as the practice of using video streaming in the background as an audio source [30], "nudging" users to lower fidelity data streams [43], using locally stored content to reduce streaming at peak times [64], and many others. In this paper, we use an intervention based on one of these (video streaming in the background) to concretely illustrate our proposed approach to assessment and to demonstrate the potential value of SID insights.…”