Many ideas on sustainability during Act! Sustainable at the IT Faculty
Many interesting ideas emerged during the Act! Sustainable week 2019. The IT Faculty and the Faculty of Education Sciences were responsible for Thursday's programme.
The events of the IT Faculty took place in the Visual Arena in Lindholmen Science Park, and the Dome of Visions – the plexiglass bubble at Lindholmen
Early in the morning ten students and researchers from the IT Faculty gathered to present their research on different angles of sustainability and how they are working with these issues. A follow-up poster presentation at the venue demonstrated how many different ideas and completely different approaches there are to tackle sustainability problems.
"How to connect sustainability, society and the IT industry?"
One of the events organised by the IT Faculty was called "How to connect sustainability, society and the IT industry?", where invited guest speakers discussed the question of what the IT industry can do to contribute to a more sustainable society – and what already is done today.
Aksel Biørn-Hansen from Svalna presented the app they have developed at Svalna, where people can see in what way their "carbon footprint" changes over overtime when they change their habits. The app collects information on housing, car ownership, consumption patterns and more, supplemented by information obtained from their bank accounts.
Ana Shontova from DataTjej talked about the importance of making greater use of the female leadership skills that already exist to solve the gender diversity problems in the IT area. The field still has too low a proportion of women and one of the underlying problems is that women are not treated in the same way as men. The structures and attitudes need to be worked on considerably more. The broader the work, and the more angles from different facets in society, the more dynamic the solutions.
Jonas André from Volvo Group talked about many projects within the company for reducing energy consumption and emissions mainly through automation and IT, but also projects for contributing to the social dimension of sustainability.
Annaam Butt from OpenHack Gothenburg described how students from different backgrounds meet in their Hackathons, where they with the help of open source, together develop new solutions to social and humanitarian problems.
Annaam Butt, Project & Community Manager at OpenHack Gothenburg, presents her visions. Photo: Catharina Jerkbrant
Sustainability event for employees
The day also contained events especially aimed at faculty members. Three different workshops in the Dome of Visions focused on how employees can include sustainability in different parts of their work within the IT Faculty. The first workshop was about ideas, methods and new approaches to making sustainability a more comprehensive part of the teaching at the IT Faculty. The aim of the second workshop was to try to map the research conducted at both the departments related to the IT Faculty, where a basic idea was to also discover interesting potential collaborations across departmental boundaries and divisions. The last workshop focused on sustainable research communication: challenges, successful initiatives and how we can further develop direct communication with people outside the academy. Many are interested in what we do, but which are the alternative ways of communicating?
Design Jam: "DESIGN ETHICS: Towards Sustainable Futures"
The final event of the day was the award ceremony in the workshop "Design Jam: DESIGN ETHICS: Towards Sustainable Futures". Eight teams, with students mixed from different backgrounds and a broad range of programmes at the IT Faculty, worked intensively throughout the afternoon to create ethical and sustainable solutions to a variety of societal problems. The lucky winning team consisted of students Ahmad Idrees Samadi, Bhavya Shukla, Jacob Laggar, Hilda Haqvinsson, Vasiliki Ziourka, Rongzhen Chen, and Sjoerd Hendriks, from the programmes Software Engineering and Management, Cognitive Science, Learning, Communication and IT, and Interaction Design and Technologies. The team consisted of both master's and undergraduate students. (Photo of the team on top of the page!)
Organizers of "ACT! SUSTAINABLE at the IT Faculty":
- Elissa Shaw and Alice Srugies from the Department of Applied IT
- Jennifer Horkoff, Francisco Gomes, Mafalda Samuelsson-Gamboa, and Birgit Penzenstadler from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
- Filip Fatic, Johnny Hamnesjö Olausson, Liv Lervik Alterskjaer, and Araz Farkosh – student volunteers