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Digital transformation is now reaching into topics like End-of-life Care, Funeral Culture, and Coping with Grief. Those developments are inevitably accompanied by the growing challenge to design IT systems that are appropriate and helpful for the stakeholders involved. Our aim in this paper is to further introduce the rather new combined research field of Socioinformatics and Thanatology (the scientific study of death and dying) and to present it with the first results on which requirements to consider for the design of digital tools within ‘Thanatopractice’. By using Participatory Design and the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) in the context of three workshops on socio-technical systems (Online Pastoral Care, Virtual Graveyards, and AI Memory Avatars), we want to sensitize software practitioners to the multidimensional impacts of their products and services in a field, which the participants in the workshops often described as “highly sensitive”.
For many practitioners, considering sustainability during a software development project is a challenge. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) is a tool for thinking through short, medium-and long-term impacts of socio-technical systems on its surrounding environment. While SusAF has been used by several companies, is not widely adopted in industry yet. In this Vision Paper, we discuss the options for extending the reach of SusAF and what it would take to evolve SusAF into a (de-facto) standard
Umsetzung eines Pay-as-you-Live Systems : Konzeptioneller Ansatz für ein eigenständiges PAYL-System
(2021)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations focus on key issues for the transformation of our world towards sustainability. We argue for stronger integration of the SDGs into requirements and software engineering and for the creation of methods and tools that support the analysis of potential effects of software systems on sustainability in general and on SDGs in particular. To demonstrate one way of undertaking this integration, we report on how the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF -- a tool developed by the authors of this paper) can be mapped to the SDGs, allowing the identification of potential effects of software systems on sustainability and on the SDGs. This mapping exercise demonstrates that it is possible for requirements engineers working on a specific system to consider that system's impact with respect to SDGs.
Software engineering, as a central practice of digitalization, needs to become accountable for sustainability. In light of the ecological crises and the tremendous impact of digital systems on reshaping economic and social arrangements - often with negative side-effects - we need a sustainability transformation of the digital transformation. However, this is a complex and long-term task. In this article we combine an analysis of accountability arrangements in software engineering and a model of sustainability transformations to trace how certain dynamics are starting to make software engineering accountable for sustainability in the technological, cultural, economic and governance domains. The article discusses existing approaches for sustainable software engineering and software engineering for sustainability, traces emerging discourses that connect digitalization and sustainability, highlights new digital business models that may support sustainability and shows governance efforts to highlight “green and digital” policy problems. Yet, we argue that these are so far niche dynamics and that a sustainability transformation requires a collective and long-lasting effort to engender systemic changes. The goal should be to create varied accountability arrangements for sustainability in software engineering which is embedded in complex ways in society and economy.
The Elephant in the Room - Educating Practitioners on Software Development for Sustainability
(2021)
Applications for the Internet of Things are becoming increasingly popular. Due to the large amount of available context data, such applications can be used effectively in many domains. By interlinking these data and analyzing them, it is possible to gather a lot of knowledge about a user. Therefore, these applications pose a threat to privacy. In this paper, we illustrate this threat by looking at a real-world application scenario. Current state of the art focuses on privacy mechanisms either for Smart Things or for big data processing systems. However, our studies show that for a comprehensive privacy protection a holistic view on these applications is required. Therefore, we describe how to combine two promising privacy approaches from both categories, namely AVARE and PATRON. Evaluation results confirm the thereby achieved synergy effects.