Sustainability and IT – My magnum opus at RIT
February 15th, 2010Scott Hawker, former adviser and head of my capstone project’s committee at RIT, emailed my publication-ready monograph not long ago:

Here’s the abstract:
Information technology holds tremendous potential to help consumers and firms make more sustainable choices by providing information at key decision points. As one example, there are a number of software programs that help calculate and summarize environmental metrics for various products and processes. Surprisingly, while many printers are moving into the IT arena, the technology has not been fully utilized. For the most part, there is a lack of knowledge on the part of the consumer on the sustainability impacts of their communication decisions. Thus, this paper outlines a decision tool, presented to the consumer as they make a print decision, which estimates the energy consumption of printing a given document by analyzing the user’s requirements for the print job, the printer selected and the corresponding life-cycle criteria for these elements.
If you’d like to read more, here’s the link to the paper in PDF format. I’ll be uploading the other major component of this work (i.e. Java code) in the near future.


