University of California, Irvine
IN-1: Innovation 1

A research team called the Social Code Group, under the leadership of Associate Professor of Informatics Bill Tomlinson, has undertaken a series of information technology projects over the past several years designed to help people live more sustainably. A list of several specific projects the team has worked on during the past three years is below.

• Software Engineering for Sustainability: Current software engineering practices lead to significant environmental impacts, such as power consumption of software operation and e-waste from computers made obsolete by software upgrades. This project has sought to enable sustainability-related concepts to be brought to bear on the software engineering process. As an example of work in this domain, in 2012 MS student Ankita Raturi’s thesis, titled “Visualizing the Energy Footprint of a Software Development Environment,” described a prototype of an energy data consolidation tool and accompanying energy dashboard to present the data that she built.

• Games, Education, and Sustainability: Computer games have significant potential as tools for education, in particular in the sustainability domain. Our research group has pursued a variety of projects in this area, including projects about restoration ecology, systems thinking, and environmental causality. As an example of work in this domain, in 2012 PhD student Joel Ross’s dissertation, titled “Assessing Understanding of Complex Causal Networks Using an Interactive Game,” described a prototype of an interactive game system for assessing causal understanding through cognitive causal mapping, with the goal of improving middle school environmental education.

• Resource Sharing: Our team created an online system to allow residents of University Hills, the faculty and staff housing community at UCI, to share various household resources such as ladders, lawnmowers, and bicycles. The system is designed to reduce the need for redundant resources and their accompanying environmental costs, as well as to build stronger relationships within the community. This system, called “Can I Borrow Your Goat” (after a line from the Monty Python hermit sketch), is currently online and in active usage by the community.

Each of these projects is described in greater detail at the URL below.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/socialCodeGroup/projects.html

The ideas in these and other related projects have been presented in a variety of contexts over the past three years as well, including a 2010 MIT Press book called “Greening through IT” by Prof. Tomlinson and presentations at numerous academic conferences and an NSF Workshop on the Role of Information Sciences and Engineering in Sustainability and a National Academies Workshop on Innovation in Computing and Information Technology for Sustainability.

UC Irvine has not previously received a STARS innovation credit fort his practice, policy, program, or outcome.