Contributions published at Informatics and Sustainability Research (Lorenz Hilty)

Many factors influence the decisions that lead to an individual?s daily schedule; the resulting lifestyle greatly influences the individual?s environmental impact. This schedule refers to the individual?s daily time-use pattern, i.e. the sequence of activities the individual performs on a given day. As travel is an activity with high environmental impacts, categorizing individuals with respect to their travel behavior is one of the key requirements in predicting and affecting individual behavior on a larger scale. We adapt and apply an existing lifestyle classification, Claritas PRIZM Premier, to sequential time use data from the Multinational Time-Use Study (MTUS). Using R with the sequence analysis tool TraMineR, we analyze categorized daily activity schedules to gain insights on whether the variables that went into creating said lifestyle classification affect the typical travel patterns found within the dataset. Additionally, travel activities are categorized into recreational, work-related and maintenance travel, meaning that different impacts of lifestyle could be measured for each travel type. Results show significant correlations between lifestyle-determining factors and work travel in both frequency and distribution, while recreational travel and maintenance travel show little to no dependency on lifestyle categories. While the applied lifestyle categorization significantly influences travel behavior, it is not sufficient for accurately predicting individual travel schedules.

In loser Folge stellt TA-SWISS Mitglieder des Leitungsaus- schusses vor. Anlässlich der Klausursitzung im September stand Lorenz Hilty Red und Antwort. Er ist Professor am Institut für Informatik der Uni- versität Zürich wie auch an der Abteilung für Technologie und Gesellschaft der Empa.

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) is changing the interaction with a home environment. These changes affect time, place, frequency, and how they interact with the home. This paper highlights the most common interactions with a home environment and how they are transformed by ICT. The work takes place in three phases: The first phase defines what an interaction with a living environment is and how these interactions can be categorized. In the second phase, the effects of smart home solutions on these interactions are shown in an experiment. The third phase analyzes the data from the experiment, where a conventional residential environment is compared to a smart home. The comparison is made under the aspects of time, place, frequency and their modalities.

Typically, TA projects bring together people with diverse normative orientations. We present a methodological approach intended to support participants to deal with the plurality of values in a transparent way by using an online tool to prepare for the discussion. The method called “LOTA“ (Landscape of Opinions for Technology Assessment) is based on global goals which are presented to the participants as a normative frame of reference. By prioritizing global goals, the participants can express their normative orientations. The software tool visualizes the “landscape of opinions“ resulting from the survey.

Problem: In transdisciplinary discussions about potential technological solutions to societal problems, it often remains unclear for what reasons the participants arrive at different conclusions: 1. Because they are making different assumptions on the factual possibilities and limitations of the technology? 2. Because they are using different value systems in which they evaluate the consequences of the technological applications? Method to address the problem: Before the participants enter into direct discourse, they take part in an online consultation. This online consultation is made for the elicitation of their normative orientation. The result will then be visualised as a „landscape of opinions“ and provided to the participants at the beginning of a following face-to-face workshop. With this tool, we want to support the participants in differentiating betweeen descriptive and normative basic assumptions (what is or will be vs. what ought to be).

Information and communication technology (ICT) is often considered a technology for reducing environmental emissions by increasing energy and resource efficiencies of processes. However, due to other effects of ICT, such as rebound and induction effects, the net benefits of ICT in terms of environmental impact are by no means assured. Even though the relevance of indirect or higher order effects has become a well-known issue in recent years, their environmental assessment remains controversial. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the most established environmental assessment methods for modelling the environmental effects of goods and services throughout their life cycle. Although LCA is traditionally rather product-focused, there exist also LCA-based approaches to assess higher order effects of technology replacement and optimization. This paper examines whether and how LCA case studies on environmental effects of ICT already take into account related higher order effects. A systematic review of scientific literature published since 2005 has been conducted and 25 case studies were analyzed in detail. The following research questions were addressed: i) Which products are assessed? ii) Which higher order effects of ICT are considered; and iii) how is the integration of higher order effects methodically realized? The results show that few case studies were concerned with the environmental effects of the introduction of ICT services in commerce, telework and monitoring and control. Most studies investigated the substitution of certain media with electronic devices or digital services. It was found that technology-based higher order effects, such as optimization and substitution, are usually included in the assessment by choosing comparative study designs, while user-related higher order effects, such as rebound effects and induction effects, are less often considered. For the latter effects, methodological integration was mainly provided by scenario modelling and sensitivity analysis. Overall, most studies chose an attributional LCA approach. It can be concluded from the results that, in particular, user-related effects such as rebound effects have not yet been frequently included in the environmental assessment of ICT. The identified research gaps include in particular interdisciplinary approaches on how changing use patterns can be more strongly observed in LCA.

Die digitale Transformation lebt nicht von Daten und Algorithmen allein: Sie benötigt auch eine Menge Roh- stoffe und Energie. Green IT verfolgt das Ziel, die damit verbundenen Belastungen für Mensch und Umwelt zu verringern. Das ist sinnvoll, genügt aber nicht als Grund- lage für eine nachhaltige Digitalisierung.

Schon vor 20 Jahren hoffte man dank digitaler Technologien weniger Material und Energie für die Befriedigung von Konsumbedürfnissen aufwenden zu müssen. Eine relative Dematerialisierung von Produktion und Konsum sollte das zentrale Dilemma der nachhaltigen Entwicklung lösen: die Bedürfnisse von immer mehr Menschen zu befriedigen und gleichzeitig die Natur zu entlasten. Diese mit der Digitalisierung verbundene Chance ist theoretisch noch intakt – praktisch sind bis heute jedoch kaum Fortschritte zu verzeichnen. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert mögliche Ursachen und Zukunftsperspektiven.

“To an observer B, an object A* is a model of an object A to the extent that B can use A* to answer questions that interest him about A.” This definition includes concrete, tangible models as well as conceptual models that are described in (usually formal) languages.

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Estimating indirect environmental impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is important because ICTs have the potential to make the world more sustainable. However, studies that estimate indirect environment impacts apply a variety of methods and tend to ignore interactions among different use cases. This makes it difficult to interpret their results and limits their usefulness to policy makers. In this thesis it is investigated how the timeuse based approach proposed by Bieser and Hilty (2018b), which addresses this issue, can be implemented in an agent-based model. The proposed model is based on theoretical insights from activity-based modelling as well as insights from modelling human decision making in agent-based modelling. An agent-based model that incorporates all of those insights has been designed and implemented using the MASON framework. The implementation is documented according to the Overview, Design concept, Details (ODD) protocol and its extension the ODD + D protocol. This documentation enables potential users to get familiar with all the details of the model. Furthermore, with the help of this documentation it is possible to use or extend both the model’s design as well as its implementation. The model is validated in various ways. The face validation shows that the model’s basic functionality works as expected and that all of the model’s requirements have been implemented successfully. The model’s usage is demonstrated as part of its face validation. The subsequent sensitivity analysis provides detailed insights into how the models output is affected by the numerous parametrization and configuration options the model user can apply. Finally, a calibration of the model based on empirical time-use data provides additional evidence that the model is capable of simulating individual time use.

Facilitating change in food consumption towards more environmentally friendly products demands informing consumers about the environmental impact of their food product choices. While CO2 emissions and various other environmental values for over 700 food product classes are computed by the organization Eaternity, ambiguous spellings and diverse synonyms pose a major challenge. To address this challenge, in this work a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) is trained to match different spellings and synonyms of food product strings to the food product classes of the Eaternity database. Improving the scalability of matching food product strings to their corresponding food product classes enables a more efficient provisioning of environmental values for previously unseen spellings and synonyms of food products and therefore reach a larger population faster.

The term 'Internet of Things (IoT)' represents a buzzword, especially in the recent years. IoT offers the potential to represent the next technological revolution towards the Future Internet as it introduces a paradigm shift from the Internet of People to the Internet of Things. With estimates up to 50 billion devices connected over the Inter-net by the year 2020, IoT is expected to grow rapidly and it yields a tremendous amount of applications provid-ing countless opportunities. Even though IoT is still in its early development stage, some industries and businesses already employ it to some degree. In the non-corporate world however, i.e., in the private realm, applications of IoT for private users emerged as recently as a few years ago, therefore representing a fairly novel concept in the private domain. Despite IoT offering such a huge enabling potential, it inevitably has its downsides. For example, the more wide-spread and deployed IoT is in the private realm, the more exposed are private users to the associated risks there-of. This Master Thesis addresses the issue of said risks and provides a classification of risks of IoT for private users.

Die digitale Transformation lebt nicht von Daten und Algorithmen allein: Sie benötigt auch Rohstoffe und Energie. Green IT verfolgt das Ziel, die damit verbundenen Belastungen für Mensch und Umwelt zu verringern. Das ist sinnvoll, genügt aber nicht als Grundlage für eine nachhaltige Digitalisierung.

LOTA (Landscape of Opinions in Technology Assessment) is a software tool to be used in participatory research initiatives (e.g. in transdisciplinary processes), which aims at increasing transparency on their normative foundations and enabling a rational discourse among the involved stakeholders. Outcomes of participatory research projects are strongly affected by the normative orientations of involved stakeholders such as policy makers, consumers, business experts, or the researchers themselves. In transdisciplinary research, their normative orientations both influence the co-design of the study as well as its outcomes. Researchers reporting from participatory projects usually aim to provide neutral results, i.e. results that contain both the descriptive aspects of the subject and – clearly separated – the normative aspects in the most possible neutral way. This is a challenge as normative neutrality is hardly possible for a researcher who aims to provide insights to society that contribute to a better live today and for the coming generations (Torgersen, 2018). The normative orientations of all participants in a transdisciplinary project, including the researchers, is framed by basic normative assumptions which may vary considerably from individual to individual. To what extent the research process succeeds in dealing with the tensions among assumed norms and values has a high impact on the quality of the study. Transparency of normative assumptions is thus crucial for transdisciplinary and participatory research initiatives. Making value orientations explicit and transparent is, however, hard for many stakeholders.

Sharing has been a common form of access to resources in human societies. While sharing is as old as mankind, the ‘sharing economy’ is a phenomenon that advanced with digital information and communication technology (ICT), in particular the Internet, and came to the fore as a part of the digital transition. The proliferation of digital platforms and the increasing interest in participation in the sharing economy calls for a better understanding of the current trends and future course of digital sharing and its implications for sustainability. The present work introduces the intersection between “sustainability” and the “digital sharing economy” as a subject area that requires a transdisciplinary approach. The study of the digital sharing economy will inevitably require scholars and experts from manifold disciplines; this can encourage collaboration and knowledge co-producttion in achieving common understandings, joint approaches, and compatible solutions to tackle complex societal issues. In cases, society has been unable to perceive the changes brought by digital transition alongside its pace. This has led to limitations and deficiencies in projecting future trends and implications of digitalization for societies. Based on the ontological assumption of this work, all human interactions are in fact social practices; these practices shape shape society and in particular economic structures. This ontology has been also used in former studies on the impacts of the ICT applications on society and the environment in the normative context of sustainability, e.g. in the work of Hilty and Aebischer (2015). The conceptual framework proposed by Hilty and Aebischer, which we use as the analytical tool for our transdisciplinary approach, structures and analyzes the life-cycle effects, enabling effects, and structural effects (LES model) of digitalization. Therefore, our findings are drawn from the adoption of the LES model to address the interdisciplinary implications of the digital sharing economy, as one existing “use-case” of ICT, for the sustainability of the environment and societies. We found that the enabling effects of digital sharing for the various actors in production and consumption processes and the effects of sharing on sustainability requires investigation. The expected long-term structural changes resulting from these enabling impacts should be also considered with regard to their relevance for sustainability. From a structural change perspective, the digital sharing economy has promoted individual economic empowerment, but it has also raised some social and environmental concerns. In particular, it has been criticized for labour exploitation and its tendencies to create unequal access in communities, to create unregulated marketplaces and to promote unfair competition. Therefore, prominent considerations here would be towards creating and improving equal opportunities for fair distribution/competition for everyone in sharing markets. Institutions and related policies can speed up the digital transition towards sustainable development. For policy making with regard to digital sharing practices, it will be essential to define paradigms that support sustainable, collaborative production and consumption with respect to planetary boundaries.

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