Elina Eriksson

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Surveys of urban history from ancient times to the present reveal a continuum of collective responses to pandemics ranging from quarantine facilities and monitoring the spread of disease to building new wastewater networks. The contemporary COVID-19 pandemic includes new digital tools and techniques that supplement (and sometimes replace) the exist...

With each IPCC report, the science basis around climate change increases extensively in terms of scope, depth, and complexity. The challenge is making this knowledge accessible to society – and reforming the way researchers generate, package, and communicate scientific findings to produce real climate action.

The widespread awareness and the sense of urgency and helplessness regarding the ongoing sustainability crisis (climate change, biodiversity loss etc.) can evoke feelings of grief, sorrow, despair and anxiety. Those emotions are seldom discussed in computing or in computing education. They can have detrimental effects on the well-being of students...

In this chapter, we posit that academics need to reduce their flying in line with the ‘Carbon Law’ if we are to attain the agreed-upon targets of the Paris agreement. This entails reducing emissions in general as well as reducing emissions from flying by at least 50 per cent every decade from 2020 and on. We present data from KTH Royal Institute of...

Understanding how scholars reason about their own flying habits is important when dealing with the problems of large emissions from academic air travel. This study is based on a travel habits survey with scholars at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. KTH has relatively high emissions from air travel, but at the same time, it has a high...

CO2 emissions from aviation have been predicted to increase over the coming decades. Within the academic world, flying is often perceived to be a necessary prerequisite to being a successful researcher. Many Swedish universities have ambitious climate goals, but are simultaneously among the top emitters in the public sector. Reaching stated climate...

Animistic and anthropomorphic principles have long been investigated along with affective computing in both HCI and HRI research, to reduce user frustration and create more emotive yet relatable devices, robots, products and artefacts. Yet such artefacts and research have mainly been from user-centric perspectives and the animistic characteristics...

While the past is present in all futuring activities it tends to remain implicit and has not received adequate attention by futures scholars and practitioners. In response, this conceptual paper offers a novel framework with which the past can be brought into futures studies in a structured and comprehensive way. We begin by providing a brief accou...

A regenerative thriving future within limits will require a change of social practices. Such a change will however not come by itself, and it is safe to state that computing in different forms and shapes will be critical. In this paper we evaluate a start-up in the form of an online platform supporting peer-to-peer storage space rentals. We will pr...

There is a lack of futures studies addressing consumption and lifestyles at the level of everyday life. This article reports on the transformation of the policy-orienting scenario “Legato”, developed by the Swedish Energy Agency in 2016, to a practice-oriented design speculation. The article describes the process of transformation and the resulting...

In this paper, we present a structured report on a dialogue on the Future of Computing and Wisdom. The dialogue consists of a recorded and transcribed discussion between researchers and practitioners in the field of Human–Computer Interaction that was held at workshop in conjunction with the 10th Nordic Conference on Human–Computer Interaction in S...

Food production and consumption present major sustainability challenges, and finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of food, for example through behavioural changes by consumers, is becoming increasingly important. In recent years, digital interventions have become important tools to change behaviours in many areas. In this review, we eval...

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the warnings of a disrupted climate system, from melting ice caps to species extinction. But the problems are so far removed, and so large, we often wonder what does this have to do with our work as computer scientists?

There has been an increasing interest in discussing the consequences of the technologies we invent and study in HCI. Whether it is climate change, ethical computing, capitalist and neo-liberal models of commerce and society, grassroots movements, big data or alternative paradigms in distributed systems, this workshop will invite participants to exp...

Despite many contributions to Sustainable HCI stressing the importance of "moving beyond the individual", a majority of HCI work is still targeted mainly at consumers or resource users. However, many stakeholders influence resource use and including such stakeholders in design work can open up new design opportunities for supporting sustainable pra...

We need to transition our society in a more sustainable direction, for example through enormous cut-downs in carbon emissions. Yet this future is hard to envision and work towards. In this project we have, with a transition design posture, designed tools that we believe can be useful to initiate dialogues and reflections on the future. In particula...

The future is inherently hard to predict, yet we know there are various factors that will limit the future of computing (scarcity of materials, energy shortages and various biophysical limits) in both substantial and disruptive ways. When we look at the past and at mainstream projected computing futures, all we see is exponential growth. While it i...

Background As a renewable energy solution, photovoltaics (PVs) are crucial in the transition to a more sustainable energy system. Besides large PV installations, household adoption of PVs will be an important contribution to this transition. However, the adoption of PVs on a household level faces many barriers, with gathering and understanding info...

We must accept the present reality – only thereby do we have the possibility to understand it, relate to it to influence it and create culture that is a flexible tool for the transition. This is the opening paragraph of "Vitiden - an energy fiction"* where the transition to a more sustainable society is explored through interacting text and image....

There is unequivocal evidence that we are facing the greatest energy transition since the dawn of the industrial age. We need to urgently shift from a global fossil fuel and CO2-emitting energy system to 1) decrease our CO2 emissions and combat the effects of climate change and 2) face a future of depleting fossil fuel resources.Yet there is still...

The ongoing and escalating urbanisation has resulted in a situation where a majority of people worldwide live in cities. Cities stand for a substantial part of the world GDP and are often lifted as possible drivers of sustainable development. However, the city has limitations and vulnerabilities. Cities depend on resources flowing into the city and...

The pathway to a sustainable society is not clear, and we need to consider different developmental possibilities. This paper describes the results of a research project in the intersection of HCI and Futures Studies as well as in the intersection between "the future information society" and sustainability. We here present parts of the body of mater...

Despite increasing interest, Sustainable HCI has been critiqued for doing too little, and perhaps also at times for doing the wrong things. Still, a field like Human-Computer Interaction should aim at being part of transforming our society into a more sustainable one. But how do we do that, and, what are we aiming for? With this workshop, we propos...

The Global Dimension in Engineering Education (GDEE) refers to all non-technical topics that will impact the engineering profession at a global level over the next couple of decades. As teachers at a Media Technology engineering programme at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Communication, we have definitely felt...

There has been much interest in the Sharing Economy in recent years, accompanied with the hope that it will change and specifically make better use of existing resources. It intuitively makes sense, from a sustainability point of view, that the sharing of resources is good. It could even be said that the Sharing Economy ought to align well with Com...

The 29th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection and the third International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, EnviroInfo & ICT4S 2015, took place as a joint conference in Copenhagen in September 7 ‐ 9 2015 and was hosted by the University of Copenhagen and the European Environment Agency. EnviroInfo is a series of...

In this position paper we discuss a set of problems particular to computing within limits that draws on psychological and sociological barriers. The enormity of the predicaments we are facing, global climate change and resource scarcity, together with the social, cultural and national settings in which we are facing these predicaments, are seriousl...

The role of IT at the workplace has changed dramatically from being a tool within the work environment to include all aspects of social and private life. New workplaces emerge where IT becomes more and more divergent, embedded and pervasive. These new aspects of IT at work need to be addressed with new or adapted human centred activities. This pape...

In this paper we analyze interviews from four technology-intensive companies, focused on service and service development. All companies have during the last two decades introduced interaction design units, and the corporations were selected due to their interest in also expanding the service share of their business. This service shift has been a to...

Sustainability has been an established topic at the main CHI conference since 2007. It has, however, not been an equally prominent theme at the NordiCHI conference. It is now time to establish Sustainable HCI as an important and prominent topic also at NordiCHI.

This paper examines the obstacles for and discusses possible solutions to successfully establishing a User Centred Perspective (UCP) in organisations. The analysis is made with the use of the theory Communities of Practice (CoP). The analysis is based on a cross case study based on two longitudinal action research projects. In these studies we iden...

Many media technology and computer science engineering students suffer from the preconceived opinion that sustainability is at best peripheral, and at worst irrelevant to their education. In this paper we discuss our experiences of integrating sustainability and ICT4S into a media technology engineering programme. An overarching tension has been in...

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to discuss them is rare...

Recent years have seen a rapid growth of ICT-services related to the transportation area, and for example Advanced Travel Information Services (ATIS) have been proposed as one means to achieve a decrease of environmental impacts of transportation through behavioural change. However, empirical studies have shown that travel planning in every day lif...

In this paper, we address the issue of teaching a subject, sustainability, that ideally should permeate the whole engineering education, but at the moment often plays a minor role in the curriculum. Here we discuss the tactics of planning and conducting a sustainability course with the explicit goal of truly engaging the students and making an impa...

Some organizations fail to involve users in systems development due to a widespread organization, high workload or secrecy issues. A remedy against this situation could be the persona method in which users and main stakeholders as represented as fictitious characters. Personas help eliciting user needs and requirements, facilitate design choices an...

The problem of how to implement user-centred design (UCD) is well established as a research topic within HCI. Yet there are unresolved issues in order for UCD to actually be used in practice. This paper will present a case study within Sweden’s military defense organizations, concerning the introduction of UCD. The overarching goal of the research...

This paper presents a longitudinal case study in which six Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers worked extensively in an action research cooperation with a public authority over a period of four years. The purpose of the cooperation was to increase the focus on usability in the authority, and the main research question was how user centered...

This paper presents a longitudinal case study in which six Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers worked extensively in an action research cooperation with a public authority over a period of four years. The purpose of the cooperation was to increase the focus on usability in the authority, and the main research question was how user centred...

The ideas related to user centred systems design are difficult to implement in organisations and usability is given low priority in in-house systems development. This problem is multifaceted and complex and needs to be addressed with a method capable of adapting to situations, people and context. In this paper we outline a new method – usability co...

How do you do usability work when no usability expertise is available? What happens in an organization when system developers, with no previous HCI knowledge, after a 3-day course, start applying usability methods, and particularly field studies? In order to answer these questions qualitative data were gathered through participatory observations, a...

This paper presents a longitudinal case study in which six Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers worked extensively in an action research cooperation with a public authority over a period of four years. The purpose of the cooperation was to increase the focus on usability in the authority, and the main research question was how user centred...

One of the most common ways of introducing usability into development work in a public authority is by employing a usability expert. But how successful is this strategy when it comes to increasing focus on usability in the organization and how successful have these usability experts been in introducing usability activities into the development work...

One major goal of research within the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) community is to develop or refine theories and methods that can be used in practice, in the system development process. However usability methods are not always with ease adopted in the system development process or in organizations [1,2].

This short paper questions the focus on automation of e- government processes, and efficiency in e-government, which is prevalent in both research and in practice in Swedish governments. We argue that this focus on automation and efficiency might cause unhealthy work for civil servants, and services that do not meet the demands or needs of the citi...

This study has been performed in order to improve the usability of computer-based speech training (CBST) aids. The aim was to engage the users of speech training systems in the first step of creating a new CBST aid. Speech therapists and children with hearing-or speech impairment were interviewed and the result of the interviews is presented in the...