Digital Ecologies Lab
The Digital Ecologies Lab at Uppsala University explores the relationship between digital technology, climate change, and local environments. The lab aims to promote sustainable futures, involving an interdisciplinary team working with various stakeholders.
Introduction
Digital technologies are often portrayed as immaterial, and resource-efficient. Yet every message sent and video streamed depends on a vast web of material infrastructure. Data centers need electricity to run, cables deep in the ocean carry intercontinental internet traffic, and minerals pulled from the earth are required for the batteries, screens and microchips in our phones. These infrastructures anchor our digital world in material realities that consume energy and exert tangible pressure on the environment.
The purpose of the Digital Ecologies Lab is to investigate this pressure, and we approach this at the intersection of Environment, Human, and Machine.
Environment, Human, Machine
The Digital Ecologies Lab situates itself at the overlap of these domains, all interrelated. We are custodians of the natural environment, we create, maintain and depend on machines, and those machines utilise resources from and impact the environment. It is impossible and unhelpful to fully isolate these domains, and for this reason, analyses and solutions must take into consideration their interaction.
From this central position, the Digital Ecologies Lab understands digital sustainability as an inherently interdisciplinary challenge, requiring attention to technological design, human behaviour, and ecological limits simultaneously.Research Themes (what we study)
Reserach Themes (what we study)
The Environmental Impacts of Digital Infrastructure
Analysing the energy consumption and emissions associated with the infrastructure and services that support everyday digital technologies.
Designing for Efficiency and Sufficiency effektivitet
Studying how digital technologies mediate patterns of consumption and electricity demand, with attention to efficiency, design choices, and possibilities for mitigating unnecessary or excessive use.
Living with and through Digital Services
Exploring the role of digital services in everyday life, including routines, meanings, and dependencies, and how these might be transformed to enable more sustainable practices.
Current Research Projects
- The Internet Microscope: Assessing the energy and environmental impacts of online services, and their role in everyday life
- Game On?: Identifying environmentally sustainable trajectories for video games
- EV drivers in the driver’s seat: Smart charging from a user perspective
- Interaction design for the Solar Internet
- Climate transitions in contested forests: Justice and governance in digital times
People
- Mike Hazas is Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, and has been studying the environmental and social implications of digital technology for nearly 15 years.
- Jeanelle Carty is a PhD researcher, examining how the attention economy shapes digital service use at scale and its potential contribution to cycles of dependence and unsustainable consumption.
- Kevin Charles Dalli is a PhD researcher in Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction, combining research-through-design with empirical investigations of online service consumption to explore sustainable futures.
- Arjun Menon is a postdoctoral researcher exploring how people make sense of environmental and consumption data in everyday life, at the intersection of interaction design, data, sustainability, and computing.
- Ossian Nordgren is a PhD researcher studying the environmental ecology of making and playing video games in Sweden. He has a background in social anthropology.
Our Teaching
IT, Sustainability and Social Responsibility 5 credits, Master's level, 1DL008
Seminars on Digital Tech and Sustainability (3 credits, PhD level).
Master thesis projects (30 credits): If you are studying a degree at Uppsala University, you can apply to do your thesis project with our lab. We advertise projects in October, to start in January and be completed in the spring term (VT).