Inf 295: Environmental Issues in Information Technology

Fall 2009
Wednesdays 3:30-6:20pm
Location: DBH 1420

Instructor

Professor: Bill Tomlinson
Email: wmt@uci.edu
Office: Bren Hall 5068
Office Phone: (949) 824-9804
Office Hours: By appointment.
Course Web Site: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/courses/Inf295F09/

Overview

Explores the relationship between recent developments in information technology and current global environmental issues. Potential topics include sustainable interaction design, ecoinformatics, electronic waste, smart grid technologies, online community building, and others that emerge during the quarter. Course activities involve reading, discussion, and a final project.

Schedule

Week	Date	Topic	Student Presenters	Readings Due	Assignments
1	Sept 30	Introduction
2	Oct 7	Environmental Costs of IT Systems (Electronic Waste, Power consumption)	Nadine, Roberto	1) IPCC 2) Climate Group 3) Chetty et al.
3	Oct 14	Sustainable Interaction Design	Nadine, Sung, Kyle	1) Blevis 2) McDonough and Braungart 3) Odom et al.	Select Teams for Final Project (Oct 15, 5pm)
4	Oct 21	Community/Politics	Sung, Six, Nazia, Nick	1) Dourish (by email) 2) Lauterbach et al. 3) CharityFocus 4 (optional)) Silberman
5	Oct 28	Presentation of proposals			Present proposal for Final Project, due in class
6	Nov 4	Energy/Smart Grid	Kyle, Rakesh, Roberto, Nick	1) Amin & Wollenberg 2) Byrne et al. 3) student-assigned readings
7	Nov 11	Veteran's Day - No Class
8	Nov 18	Globalization/Development	Six, Nazia, Rakesh	1) Hawken et al. (Ch 1) 2) Student-assigned readings
9	Nov 25	Group meetings
10	Dec 2	Presentation of Final Projects			Final Project presentation due
Exam Week	Dec 9	No class			Report on Final Project due

Assignments, Handouts and Links

Prof. Tomlinson or the students leading discussion will provide assignments at least a week before they are due. Assignments are due in class on the due date specified, unless otherwise specified.

Readings

IPCC. (2007). Summary for Policymakers. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Retrieved from http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf

Climate Group. (2008). SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/resources/publications/Smart2020Report.pdf

Chetty et al. 2009. It's not easy being green: understanding home computer power management ACM CHI.

Blevis, E. (2007) Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 503-512.

McDonough, W. & Braungart, M. (2003) Remaking the way we make things. From The Handbook of Environmental Technology Management (Edward Elgar, 2004).

Odom, W., et al. 2009. Understanding why we preserve some things and discard others in the context of interaction design. CHI 09.

Amin, S. M. & Wollenberg, B.F. (2005) Toward a smart grid: power delivery for the 21st century. Power and Energy Magazine, IEEE Volume 3, Issue 5, Sept.-Oct. 2005 Page(s):34 - 41

Byrne, J., Martinez, C. & Ruggero, C. (2009) Relocating Energy in the Social Commons. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 29, No. 2, 81-94. DOI: 10.1177/0270467609332315

Hawken, P., Lovins, A., & Lovins, L. H. (2000). Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1st ed., p. 416). Back Bay Books. Retrieved from http://www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter1.pdf

Szewczyk, R., Osterweil, E., Polastre, J., Hamilton, M., Mainwaring, A., & Estrin, D. (2004). Habitat monitoring with sensor networks. Commun. ACM, 47(6), 34-40. doi: 10.1145/990680.990704.

Grading

Class Presentations = 40%
Final Project = 40%
Class Participation = 20%

Computer and Network Use Policy

When working on UCI systems, you are bound by the UCI Computer and Network Use Policy.

Add/Drop

Students will not be permitted to add or drop this course after the beginning of class on October 7.

Note

These are guidelines intended to help students plan their work in this course. However, the instructor reserves the right to make changes to this syllabus over the course of the quarter.