Solar Internet

Financed by the Swedish Energy Agency MESAM program

As people gain more access to the Internet, they use more data and energy demanding content (Zheleva et al. 2013). Content producers, technology designers, and service providers promote more energy-intensive media, and the cycle continues. Electricity consumption from the global internet accounts for up to about 9% of all electricity used when including computing devices, data centers, and the services that connect them (Van Heddeghem, et al. 2014). This figure is projected to double by 2030 (Andrae and Elder, 2015). The exponential increase in the energy demand of IT and online services is spread among societal actors and has resulted from three things:

1. A vast proliferation of digital devices and screens to interact with (Widdicks et al. 2019a);
2. A continual increases in Internet traffic capacity (Morley et al. 2018);
3. The broad assumption by most users and many interaction designers that data traffic and online services are boundless and have little impact (Preist et al. 2016).

This assumption of boundlessness, “the cornucopian paradigm”, is evident in the “all you can eat” data plans, video streaming bundles, increasing download sizes for software and updates, and autoplayed video adverts that we encounter on a daily basis. Across the globe, as connectivity increases so too do consumption of data-intensive media (Zheleva et al. 2013). Efficiency of devices, networks and data centres cannot keep up. By contrast, understanding digital services and their energy as a limited resource and disrupting (Poole, Comber and Hoonhout, 2015) the cornucopian paradigm in use and design of Internet services, can help to develop a more sustainable energy system and build resilient internet services (Tomlinson, et al. 2013; Nardi, et al. 2018; Widdicks and Pargman, 2019).

Solar Internet explores a model of online interaction based on solar energy. We will create 5 Solar powered websites, designed around a new collection of interaction design principles and patterns for when we need to communicate energy constraints during interaction. Design principles offer general guidance on how best to think about and design for a specific context and design patterns for concrete solutions to recurring problems. We will also build a tool for consumers, designers, technology and service providers, to assess their energy demand for their Internet products. By doing so, we will demonstrate the potential for constraints-based interaction design of socio-technical infrastructures, such as the Internet, to help reduce energy consumption and design practices around Internet services.

This project will create interaction design patterns that assume constraints rather than abundance. For instance, just as your phone battery runs out, so too could your internet browsers, or the server for the website you are visiting. For example, during winter, a Swedish home could only consume approximately 50MB of data a day for every meter of solar paneling, equating to 1 minute of streaming video.

Although such limits are real for Internet users in rural and developing contexts (Wyche et al. 2010, Vigil, et al. 2015), in the current cornucopian paradigm the constraints of the Solar Internet provide a way in which we can bring the energy cost of Internet use closer to the practices of Internet use. This is a challenge to consumers, technology designers and developers, service providers and the energy-markets to reduce, by design, the electricity consumption of internet use.

This project therefore will develop constraints-based design principles and patterns for Internet services. We will use limited solar energy as a means to create and explore new interactions, services and consumption patterns associated with Internet use. Estimates from Low Tech Magazine’s solar website implementation (De Decker, 2018) suggest savings on data transfer alone amount to an approximate 80% reduction. While transforming the entire Internet to a solar-powered infrastructure is beyond the scope of this project, reductions following the approximated 80-99% energy demand per user are targeted for our solar powered websites. In addition, we seek to reduce consumer perceptions and preferences for Internet use by 10-20% (i.e. visit or revisit websites at a reduced rate).