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Low Power Web: Legacy Design and the Path to Sustainable Net Futures

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

HCI is complicit in the climate crisis, as the systems and services that we design engender unsustainable energy use and waste. HCI has equal potential to find solutions for environmental challenges and script, by design, the behavioral changes needed for sustainable net futures. We explore this dichotomy through the lens of data transmission, examining the energy consumption and environmental impact of web communications. This work begins with a critical revisiting of legacy web design that mines the past for actionable ideas towards sustainable net futures. We query how we can reduce our own net energy consumption, and plot a path to design our low-power website. In addition we speculate on a redesign of the background systems, outlining the practical steps we have taken towards solar, wind, gravity and micro-hydro low-power web hosting solutions.

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  • (2024)EcoSketch: Promoting Sustainable Design through Iterative Environmental Assessment during Early-Stage Product DevelopmentACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/36484362:2(1-29)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
4474 pages
ISBN:9781450368193
DOI:10.1145/3334480
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. green HCI
  2. low-power web
  3. renewable energy
  4. sustainable design
  5. web design

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  • Research-article

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  • Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT)

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CHI '20
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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)EcoSketch: Promoting Sustainable Design through Iterative Environmental Assessment during Early-Stage Product DevelopmentACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/36484362:2(1-29)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
  • (2024)A Framework for Sustainable Web Design in the Era of Digital TransformationSubject-Oriented Business Process Management. Models for Designing Digital Transformations10.1007/978-3-031-72041-3_13(189-208)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2024
  • (2023)On the Role of Font Formats in Building Efficient Web ApplicationsProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-031-49266-2_8(116-131)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2023
  • (2022)Have We Taken On Too Much?: A Critical Review of the Sustainable HCI LandscapeProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517609(1-11)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022

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