Designing for sustainability: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?

Abstract

Abstract-Technological developments in screen technologies pitches the thinner, brighter and energy-stingy OLED screen as a possible replacement for today's television, computer and smartphone LCD screens. An OLED screen does not consume any energy at all when it displays the color black, but the potentially large energy savings can unfortunately evaporate and instead turn to losses when white is displayed. There is thus a mismatch between on the one hand the energy profiles of OLED screens and on the other hand user habits and current webpage design practices. This example thus raises important questions about system boundaries and about how to evaluate sustainable (or "sustainable") technologies.We conducted a pilot study of user acceptance of alternative, OLED-adapted color schemes for webpages. We briefly discuss the results of the study, but primarily use it as a starting point for discussing the underlying questions of where, or indeed even if it makes sense to work towards realising the OLED screens' potential for energy savings. Moving from LED to OLED screens is not only a matter of choosing between competing screen technologies, but would rather have implications for hardware and software design as well as for the practices of web designers, end users and content providers.

Sources of variation in life cycle assessments of smartphones and tablet computers

“…The increase in GPU computation power needs to be optimized for displaying information. Today, smartphones usually embed an AMOLED display which is on average even less power-consuming than the LCD [63] because a backlight is no longer needed. However, we can assume an increase in consumption due to bigger screens.…”

Shifting the maturity needle of ICT for Sustainability

“…Laubacher [47] Bates [16]) and where responses include responses include design fictions Penzenstadler [52], and scenarios [33]. Or challenging the idea that smart equals sustainable (Rivera [50]) or questioning where we should put our effort (Pargman [78]). Or assumptions that ICT is solution (Zapico [61], Walker [32]) or the central part of the solution (von Heland [45], Gui [34]), that net effect of ICT4S is always positive (Batchelor [74], Coroama [75]), or that responding to climate change is relatively simple Shabajee [31], easily calculated (Hankel [77]) or merely providing information to change behaviour Cakici [76].…”

Design of an interdisciplinary evaluation method for multi-scaled sustainability of computer-based projects. A workbased on the Sustainable Computing Evaluation Framework (SCEF)

“…It is therefore important to be very attentive to this category of potential impacts so that they are not an excuse for designing impactful technologies. Another example is given in [19] with OLED screens. Those two examples shows that technological "solutions" are not sufficient to reduce energy consumption of ICT and that habits of end-users or the whole ecosystem regarding the use of digital tools need to be rethink.…”