Design PhD: Indirect environmental effects of digital collaboration tools' use.
Collaboration in both professional and private contexts is increasingly based on digital technologies. However, the environmental impact of this industry is escalating, and advances in energy optimization and efficiency are being cancelled out by increasingly data-intensive digital uses, geographical expansion of networks and demand for digital hardware. This PhD aims to understand how digital design methods and practices stimulate these increasingly resource and energy-intensive digital uses. A major challenge is the large amount of uncertainty and inaccuracy surrounding scenarios and estimates of the indirect environmental effects of digital technology. These limitations are especially significant in design situations, where the study of large-scale and long-term environmental consequences is difficult to carry out with the resources available. While various approaches aimed at digital professionals aim to produce quantitative indicators (e.g. carbon emission metrics), we look into the incalculable part of this growing consumption dynamic, such as the way in which (inter)dependencies and standardisation lead to digital uses that consume more resources.
