LIMITS

Research on computing within limits explores the design of computing technologies that will be appropriate for a future where availability of resources is drastically reduced. In an effort to define the scope and goals of limits-aware computing, early ...

Research in sociology, anthropology, and organizational theory indicates that most societies readily create increasingly complex societal systems. Over long periods of time, accumulated societal complexity bears costs in excess of benefits, and leads to ...

Circular economies are particularly relevant in the context of digital devices or electric and electronic equipment (EEE). Many digital devices built using scarce and potentially toxic materials have a too-short life, instead of being repaired or ...

In areas of resource scarcity, 3D printing has the potential to provide an environmentally sustainable and collapse-compliant means of production. 3D printing can reduce waste, utilize local and sustainable printing materials, and create an extensive ...

In the age of Big Open Linked Data (BOLD), we inhabit a landscape where future scenarios are imagined, modeled, planned for and embedded in policy. Between the euphoric techno-utopian rhetoric of the boundless potential of BOLD innovations and the ...

Gender inequality has long been on the list of factors that impose limits on the potential of computing, in ways that have been more and less obvious. Drawing on ethnographic findings from marginalized communities in Bangladesh, we analyze the impact of ...

"Computing Within Limits" represents a new paradigm in thinking about computing. To help communicate this new perspective to a broader audience, we created, taught, and are continuing to teach a multi-campus online course through the University of ...

This paper explores the nature of a broad range of limitations and the value of coming to terms with them. It's an attempt to help conceive and encourage a shared and coherent vision of computing for the common good that does not rely heavily on market ...

Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy-guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerable to disruption. It is widely believed that our society is exhausting ...

In this paper we explore how design fiction -- an increasingly common and relevant strategy within HCI and the Digital Humanities -- can be used to get purchase on the future. In particular, we address how design fictional methods allow researchers to ...

The Internet stands atop an unseen industrial system required for its continued growth, operation, and maintenance. Its scale could not have been achieved without this reliance, and its dependencies---ranging from sophisticated manufacturing facilities ...

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 ...

Modern communications systems rely on assumptions of centralized systems and underlying infrastructure that make them vulnerable in computing within limits scenarios. In this paper we offer case studies of issues facing connectivity in three locations ...

This discussion paper considers the nature of growth in data traffic across the Internet, as a basis for asking whether and how such growth might slow down or otherwise be limited. Over the last decade, data growth has been dramatic, and forecasts ...

The world is facing a shelter crisis that is only expected to worsen in the future as resources become scarcer and climate change, economic decline, and mass migrations pervade. In this paper, we argue that the ICT community has a major role to play in ...