Computing within Limits

This is a knowledge hub of the project 2026 at SINTEF focusing on Computing within Limits research field.

What is "Computing within Limits"?

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 have been proposed ¹:

1. Question growth
2. Consider models of scarcity
3. Reduce energy and material consumption

Key research papers

In this section we provide an overview of essential research papers for understanding Computing within Limits:

• Nardi, B., Tomlinson, B., Patterson, D. J., Chen, J., Pargman, D., Raghavan, B., & Penzenstadler, B. (2018). Computing within limits. Communications of the ACM, 61(10), 86-93.
• De Valk, Marloes. "A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices." LIMITS Workshop on Computing within Limits. PubPub, 2021.

Adjacent research fields

Computing within Limits shares parts of its motivation and goals with other research fields:

• 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

Relevant conferences

• Computing within limits
• ICT for sustainability (ICT4S)
• Sustainable AI conference

Authors

• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group: Maria Emine Nylund and Ophelia Prillard
• Trustworthy Green IoT Software group: Erik Johannes Husom

Sources

Footnotes

1. Nardi, B., Tomlinson, B., Patterson, D. J., Chen, J., Pargman, D., Raghavan, B., & Penzenstadler, B. (2018). Computing within limits. Communications of the ACM, 61(10), 86-93. ↩ ↩²

2. https://erikjohannes.no/sustainable-computing.html ↩