The multiple unfolding crises that threaten life on Earth keep many of us awake at night and leave us at a loss about how to meaningfully respond. Much of humanity's efforts to address the crises are ultimately aimed at upholding the current unsustainable paradigm of infinite growth and exploitation of both natural resources and humans. In this paper, we offer the Two Loops model of change as a framework for understanding the interrelated crises of our times - the meta-crisis - to help us find clues for personal agency and also hope. Notably, Two Loops asks us to face the need for hospicing and grieving what is dying, reorienting computing to work to what comes after and what must be protected and saved. We work through the model's various spaces for agency, i.e. innovating, naming, connecting, nurturing, illuminating in the emergent System; and stewarding, hospicing, composting and transitioning in the dying dominant System. We suggest examples and clues as to where computing and HCI professionals' agency might lie in and between the two Systems in terms of skills, tools, practices and projects. Moving forward, we welcome a deeper, large-scale collaborative mapping of the possible contributions of our profession, to include all the different specialisms of our field in the picture of how we can be of service to liveable futures.

Household consumption accounts for around 60% of Sweden’s consumption-based climate emissions. Carbon footprint calculators have been proposed as potentially effective tools for making people aware of their climate footprint, but their success in supporting habit change has been limited. One reason may be the calculators’ inability to point to concrete action, failing to give users the agency to change their routines. In this article, we shift the focus from the carbon calculator to its social context, supported by a workplace campaign. How can a workplace campaign including a footprint calculator raise awareness about the climate impacts of everyday habits and motivate lifestyle changes? We draw upon knowledge of social psychology, emphasizing the social context as a platform for change. We studied campaigns at two workplaces–how they affected employees’ pro-environmental habits and factors strengthening and weakening their motivation. We show that workplace campaigns can help employees reduce their carbon footprint through changes in everyday habits. Companies can play an essential role in supporting such processes. On the one hand, participants in the campaigns were motivated by the companies’ engagement in sustainable lifestyles and their support for employees’ efforts to form more sustainable everyday habits. Social aspects of the campaign, such as team spirit and the presence of a strong leader, also played key roles. On the other hand, participants’ motivation was weakened because the campaign did not adequately target their current practices and foster a sense of a community. Their motivation was also undermined by problems using the footprint calculator.

Den akuta klimatkrisen kräver handling från alla aktörer i samhället, inklusive universiteten. KTH har förbundit sig till ambitiösa klimatmål som stödjer Parisavtalet och har som mål att bli utsläppsneutrala 2045. Eftersom tjänsteresor, särskilt flyg, är den största källan till utsläpp på KTH är ett centralt fokus i denna strategi att minska koldioxidutsläppen från tjänsteresor med flyg. För att åstadkomma en sådan förändring initierades under 2023 ett pilotprojekt för att undersöka hur implementeringen av en koldioxidbudget på KTH skulle kunna stödja organisationen i att nå dessa mål.

Genom tre workshops tillsammans med en avdelning på ABE-skolan kom pilotprojektet fram till flera insikter som beskrivs i en rapport (se Biørn-Hansen och Nilsson, 2023), där de viktigaste resultaten poängterade i) hur viktigt det är med transparens i vem som reser vart och när, ii) vikten av att fördela resandet jämt mellan anställda, och iii) nyttan med att inrätta buffertar för att hantera oväntade händelser och variationer i utsläpp. Rapporten presenterar också ett förslag på hur man kan arbeta med en koldioxidbudget i verksamheten, där fokus ligger på att ge avdelningar mandat till att själva planera, genomföra och följa upp budgeten på lokal nivå.

Under hösten 2024 har vi arbetat med att validera insikterna från detta pilotprojektet och ytterligare förankra idén i organisationen inför ett förslag om implementering till rektor 2025. Som en del av detta arbetet har vi genomfört workshops med fyraavdelningar ute på skolorna samt med en avdelning på verksamhetsstödet. Resultaten stärker tidigare slutsatser och ger även ytterligare förslag på hur man kan arbeta med att minska flygresandet, till exempel genom att skapa incitament för resandet med tåg, skapa verktyg och guider för hur man kan värdera nyttan av en resa, samt strategier för att minska beroendet på laboratorier och forskningsinfrastruktur i andra länder. Arbetet belyser också flera svåra utmaningar och målkonflikter, så som den mellan internationalisering och hållbarhetsfrågor, vilket kommer bli nödvändigt att bearbeta för att kunna nå KTHs klimatmål.

Sustainability in and through digital technology has up until very recently been framed in modernist terms, focused on quantification and optimization of resource use. This framing has been frequently criticized for being limited in scope and impact, and has been framed as shallow sustainability in environmental ethics literature. Sustainability within computational creativity (CC) research is an emerging topic. To avoid the pitfalls of shallow sustainability, we conceptualise and propose a ’deep sustainability’ perspective in computational creativity research. This enables a relational approach to the predicament of the climate crisis by critically examining the values and assumptions that underpin CC research. Building on this, we reflect on and discuss what deep sustain-ability would mean for the future of sustainability research within the CC community, and raise critical questions with the particular aim of sparking discussions around how sustainability research is and ought to be approached within the community.

This report outlines how KTH Royal Institute of Technology could endeavor to align its business travel practices with its sustainability goal of reducing the climate impact of travel by 40% between 2015 and 2025. The core of the study involved participatory workshops with KTH's division of Real Estate Business and Financial Systems (AIE) to devise a CO2 budgeting and governance model tailored to the university's operations. This model aimed at establishing rules, practices, and strategies to mitigate challenges related to the reduction of CO2 emissions from flying, utilizing detailed flight data from 2019 as a basis for developing speculative CO2 budgets for 2025. The approach taken underscores the importance of granular data in understanding and managing travel emissions at the institutional level.

Our conclusions suggest a decentralized approach to managing carbon budgets at the divisional level, allowing for flexibility and autonomy in travel planning within predefined CO2 limits. It emphasizes the need for transparency in travel data within divisions to ensure equitable and effective participation in the carbon management process. The report calls for the development of systems to support data collection and integration into travel management processes, alongside a central oversight mechanism to ensure fair budget allocation and manage budget overruns. We propose an operational planning mechanism called "KTH Carbon Cycle" that -after further refinement - could enable KTH to meet its climate goals without significantly disrupting its operations or research activities. 

While academic papers give us space to express our knowledge andexpertise, we also need spaces to express our views, feelings, andcreative expressions towards a more sustainable life on this planet,where ICT is not always directly implicated.We are therefore very excited to share the contributions from theICT4S Zine 2024!As an alternative to the official program and traditional, peer-reviewed publications, we have taken inspiration from zineculture to gather a set of alternative and DIY contributions thatencourage authors to embrace creativity that might not always beencouraged in more traditional academic outputs focused on ICTand sustainability.This zine is a result of a call for contributions to that exploresalternative visions, ideas and critiques on the topic ofsustainability and ICT.We look forward to hear what you think about the zine.Creativity is where new ideas can grow and be nurtured. Our hopeis that the zine encourages the ICT4S community to build space forcreativity and new ideas in the future.

The climate impact of our food consumption is a key issue to sustainability. Yet understanding the food system and the impact it has can be difficult given its abstract nature. In this paper, we report on a Research through Design project aimed at designing and evaluating a data physicalization for supporting collective sense-making of the climate impact of food. Throughout the design process, we have explored the materiality of CO2 emissions and ways to design with less resource use. The resulting data physicalization, Carbon Scales, was evaluated in a three-week field study with 27 participants. Our findings show that collective sense-making can be enabled through interactive data physicalizations and that this can lead to carbon literacy. We expand on a) sustainability through design by arguing for the value of artifacts that let people stay in the interaction as this can support collective sense-making and b) sustainability in design by showcasing the value of designing with an interaction-first and materials-second mindset.

Sustainability has over the past two decades emerged as a key concern in human-computer interaction, with a much critiqued focus on quantification and eco-feedback. This approach fits within a modernist framing of sustainability, treating the environment (and our impact on it) as an externality, reducing it to a set of simple metrics. While data about the climate impact of our actions provide an important indication of harm, such data is fragmented and incomplete, capturing only a partial picture of a very wicked and entangled problem. My doctoral research departs from this notion of”information will solve the problem” and through design-oriented explorations of environmental data such as CO2 emissions from academic flying, I investigate alternative ways to engage people with environmental data in order to unsettle relations to the climate impact of our actions and foster care. So far, I have studied this through design-oriented case studies of data in action, with a specific focus on interventions aimed at engaging people in social contexts with the carbon emissions of everyday practices.

Fossil fuels contribute 86% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. These emissions must decline rapidly every year to reach Net Zero by 2050 in order to stay within internationally agreed limits for climate change. The oil and gas industry makes extensive use of information and communication technology (ICT) to run their business of supplying these fuels. In this paper, we investigate the role of ICT in the oil and gas industry, and explore how ICT professionals might reason about their involvement in this deeply unsustainable sector. Through a scoping review, we find that ICT is an essential enabler of the fossil fuel sector with ICT budgets in USD billions and tens of thousands of ICT staff. We map out case studies of collective action against unethical corporate practices and survey pragmatic and ethical bases for deciding whether to leave or stay in the oil and gas industry. Using reports from the activity of ICT professionals, we identify patterns for action. The results show that there are important gaps in the literature on the role of ICT in the oil and gas industry. To counter this, we propose a research agenda to better understand the extent to which ICT enables this damaging industry ("Tech4Bad") and how ICT professionals think about their role within it.