Understanding and Mitigating the Impact of Internet Demand in Everyday Life Kelly Victoria Widdicks School of Computing and Communications Lancaster University This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2019 I would like to dedicate this thesis to my mum, an absolute anchor in my life who started this journey in the first place by encouraging me to use a computer as a toddler. Declaration I hereby declare that except where specific reference is made to the work of others, the contents of this thesis are original and have not been submitted in whole or in part for consideration for any other degree or qualification in this, or any other university. This thesis is my own work and contains nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration with others, except as specified in the contribution statements at the beginning of this thesis. This thesis does not exceed the maximum permitted word length: it contains fewer than 80,000 words including appendices and footnotes, but excluding the bibliography. Kelly Victoria Widdicks December 2019 Understanding and Mitigating the Impact of Internet Demand in Everyday Life Kelly Victoria Widdicks School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. December 2019 Abstract Digital devices and online services are increasingly embedded within our everyday lives. The growth in usage of these technologies has implications for environmental sustainability due to the energy demand from the underlying Internet infrastructure (e.g. communication networks, data centres). Energy efficiencies in the infrastructure are important, but they are made inconsequential by the sheer growth in the demand for data. We need to transition users’ Internet-connected practices and adapt Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) design in less demanding and more sustainable directions. Yet it’s not clear what the most data demanding devices and online activities are in users’ lives, and how this demand can be intervened with most effectively through HCI design. In this thesis, the issue of Internet demand is explored—uncovering how it is em- bedded into digital devices, online services and users’ everyday practices. Specifically, I conduct a series of experiments to understand Internet demand on mobile devices and in the home, involving: a large-scale quantitative analysis of 398 mobile devices; and a mixed-methods study involving month-long home router logging and interviews with 20 participants (nine households). Through these studies, I provide an in-depth under- standing of how digital activities in users’ lives augment Internet demand (particularly through the practice of watching), and outline the roles for the HCI community and broader stakeholders (policy makers, businesses) in curtailing this demand. I then jux- tapose these formative studies with design workshops involving 13 participants; these discover how we can reduce Internet demand in ways that users may accept or even want. From this, I provide specific design recommendations for the HCI community aiming to alleviate the issue of Internet growth for concerns of sustainability, as well as holistically mitigate the negative impacts that digital devices and online services can create in users’ lives. List of Publications Contributing publications Widdicks, K., Bates, O., Hazas, M., Friday, A. and Beresford, A.R., 2017, May. De- mand around the clock: Time use and data demand of mobile devices in everyday life. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 5361-5372). ACM. Morley, J., Widdicks, K. and Hazas, M., 2018. Digitalisation, energy and data de- mand: The impact of Internet traffic on overall and peak electricity consumption. En- ergy Research & Social Science, 38, pp.128-137. Widdicks, K., Hazas, M., Bates, O. and Friday, A., 2019, April. Streaming, Multi- Screens and YouTube: The New (Unsustainable) Ways of Watching in the Home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 466). ACM. Widdicks, K.V. and Pargman, D., 2019. Breaking the Cornucopian Paradigm: To- wards Moderate Internet Use in Everyday Life. In Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Computing within Limits (LIMITS’19), pages 2:1–2:8. ACM. Contributing publications under submission Widdicks, K., Remy, C., Bates, O., Friday, A., and Hazas, M., 2019. Designing Moderate and Meaningful Experiences with Digital Devices and Online Services. In submission of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). Widdicks, K., 2019. The Importance of Responsible Design to Overcome the Neg- ative Effects of Technology. In submission for a First Monday special issue on ‘Re- sponsibility in Digital Design’. Additional publications Widdicks, K.V., Ringenson, T., Pargman, D., Kuppusamy, V. and Lago, P., 2018. Undesigning the Internet: An exploratory study of reducing everyday Internet con- nectivity. ICT4S 2018. Tendedez, H., Widdicks, K. and Hazas, M.D., 2019. Planning for the things you can’t plan for: lessons learnt from deployments in the home. Interactions, 26(1), pp.52-57. Contribution Statements Chapter 2 Parts of this chapter are published (or under submission) in the related work sections of a Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)’17 paper [392], a CHI’19 paper [393], a Computing within LIMITS’19 workshop paper [394], and a Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) journal paper [395, under re- view]. Section 2.2 in particular is formed from the TOCHI paper [395, under review]. As first author for all of these publications, the analysis of related work is my own. Chapter 3 Parts of this chapter are published or under submission: section 3.1 at CHI’17 [392] and Energy Research and Social Science (ERSS)’18 [249]; section 3.2 at CHI’19 [393]; and section 3.3 at TOCHI [395, under review]. I was the first author of three of these papers and wrote the relevant method section in the paper for which I am a second author (i.e. [249]); therefore the write-up of the methods is my own. I conducted the quantitative analysis of the Android dataset myself, however this is a secondary data- set (collected by the University of Cambridge within the ‘Device Analyzer’ project) and my analysis scripts had to be executed by Alastair Beresford in Cambridge due to restrictions of moving the data out of their servers. I also solely conducted all of the household deployments in the home Internet demand study, except H7 where Mike Hazas helped due to the amount of participants involved; Mike also conducted two interviews for H9 as I knew the participant too well, and therefore I did not want this familiarity to affect the results. The design workshop was primarily designed by my- self, with input from Christian Remy, Oliver Bates, Adrian Friday, Mike Hazas and Helena Tendedez; Christian, Oliver, as well as Kathy New, helped conduct the work- shops due to the exercises requiring involvement from experts in HCI. Chapter 4 Parts of this chapter are published in the CHI’17 [392], ERSS’18 [249], CHI’19 [393], and LIMITS’19 [394] papers or under-submission at TOCHI [395]. Specifically, sec- tion 4.1 shows visualisations and analysis published in the CHI’17 [392] and ERSS’18 papers [249]; parts of section 4.2 are published in the CHI’19 [393] paper; most of section 4.3 is under submission in the TOCHI paper [395]; and parts of the discus- sion and implications are published in the CHI’17 [392] and LIMITS’19 [394] pa- pers, or under submission in the TOCHI paper [395]. I am the first author for four of these papers [392, 393, 394, 395] and therefore the primary contributor to the analysis, ideas, discussion and implications, with the exception of Adrian Friday (co-author of the CHI’17 paper [392]) who conducted the permutation test analysis on the Android dataset. I am the second author of the ERSS’18 paper [249]; here, my primary role was to carry out the quantitative analysis of the Device Analyzer dataset, which I explore in this chapter. The majority of the findings I provide on this quantitative data are my own, but I cite the Morley et al. paper [249] twice to indicate which contributions lie with the first author. Chapter 5 The majority of this chapter, focusing on watching, is published in the CHI’19 pa- per [393]. This paper was developed alongside the co-authors Mike Hazas, Oliver Bates and Adrian Friday. However, I was the first author of this paper and the primary contributor to the data collection, analysis and ideas. Parts of the discussion and im- plications are also published in the LIMITS’19 paper [394]. I am also the first author for this paper (co-authored with Daniel Pargman); the ideas and write-up are primarily my own. Chapter 6 This chapter is currently under review as a journal paper for TOCHI [395], for which I am the first author. It also builds upon discussion I have first authored at LIM- ITS’19 [394]. All of the analysis, findings, and implications are my own—yet they were verified by the co-authors to ensure validity of the results. I also link to some of my arguments in my sole authored article, currently in submission of a First Monday special issue on ‘Responsibility in Digital Design’ [391, under review]. Chapter 7 Some of the future work presented in this chapter is currently under review in the First Monday article for a special issue on ‘Responsibility in Digital Design’ [391]. I am the sole author and therefore the arguments made are my own. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC grant number W95738G) for supporting my PhD research, as well as my continued post-doctoral work next year.