This is a knowledge hub of the project 2026 at SINTEF focusing on Computing within Limits research field.
The default view of most computing work is based on the idea that unlimited economic growth is achievable and desirable. Computing within limits field seeks to explore ways where computing may support long-term well-being within global ecological and material limits. It argues that “sustainability” must be grounded in rigorous metrics arising from those limits, and that the complexity of societal systems might be reduced, easing resource use and waste production. Three main principles to computing research has been proposed: 1) question growth, 2) consider models of scarcity and 3) reduce energy and material consumption 1.
- Green IT (Information Technology): how to design, develop and use IT in an environmentally friendly way. Green IT contains an assumption that we can “engineer around” the finiteness of the Earth’s resources and waste capacity 1
- Collapse informatics: the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity.
- Crisis informatics: concerned with technology-based studies of disaster planning and response
- ICTD: (Information and Communication Technology for Development) explored the potential of computing for improving the socioeconomic situation of the poor.
- Sustainable Interaction Design: identify how interaction designs lead to material effects
- Sustainable computing: an umbrella term for Computing viewed in the light of sustainability 2
- Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group: Maria Emine Nylund and Ophelia Prillard
- Trustworthy Green IoT Software group: Erik Johannes Husom