Moral Design and Green Technology

Welcome to the Anthropocene, the era in which humans have put a tangible mark on our planet. But also the era in which humans and technology have the potential to shape the necessary transitions towards a sustainable world. Technology and nature are often considered as two opposing phenomena. However, they are increasingly intertwined, for better or worse. In this book, we explore how technology and nature relate to one another in the moral design of new, green technology. This book is relevant for IT and engineering professionals, business leaders and policy makers with (green) innovation in their portfolios and students of (applied) science who are interested in either sustainable and green design of technology or in the application of technology – with an emphasis on AI and IT – to create a greener, more sustainable world. The chapters have been written by experts and leading researchers in an attractive, accessible, and practical writing style. Each chapter offers colourful examples and challenges the reader to critically think through moral decision-making and the design of innovations considering our planet’s perspective. This is a conceptual change in values. Nature should not be considered as a resource: it is the fabric of life that makes our own existence possible.

Table of Contents:
List of figures and tables About the authors (in alphabetical order) 1 Moral design and green technology  Bart Wernaart and Gerard Schouten 2 Sustainability struggle: economics, business, and technology A brief history and future challenges  Bart Wernaart 3 Democratizing green technology with the public stack  Max Kortlander, Anne-Marie Sweep and Imme Ruarus 4 Behavioural insights for moral design and green technology  Jeske Nederstigt 5 The moral programming of XR, and what we can learn from the AI experience  Leon Kestert, Nadisha-Marie Aliman and Bart Wernaart 6 Citizen science for nature  Simona Orzan and Gerard Schouten 7 The role of technology in human-nature-connectedness Case studies on citizen participation  Derk Jan Stobbelaar and Jetske G. de Boer 8 Food ethics and technology Towards food innovation with crowdsourced ethics  Bart Wernaart, Sonja Floto-Stammen, Marieke van Vliet, Anika Kok and Natalia Naranjo Guevara 9 How natural is our food? How relevant is that word for the design of future food?  Niels Louwaars 10 How to apply green AI in practice?  Moving from FLOPs to CO₂ footprint  Qin Zhao and Gerard Schouten 11 Lessons learned from developing green software  Luís Cruz and Petra Heck 12 A daily data workout!  Being in correspondence for a green data revolution  Danielle Arets and Jessie Harms 13 Added value of AI for studying urban plants  Barbara Gravendeel and Yannick Woudstra 14 Adding contextual information to object detection models: a wildflower monitoring case  Georgiana Manolache and Gerard Schouten 15 ARISE: a Dutch dataspace connecting nature and people  Elaine van Ommen Kloeke, W. Daniel Kissling, Julian Evans, Chantal Huijbers, Jacob Kamminga and Gerard Schouten Index

About the Author :
Bart Wernaart is Professor of Moral Design Strategy and Chair of the Centre of Expertise Sustainable and Circular Transitions at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. He earned his Ph.D. in the field of international human rights law and has extensive experience in teaching legal subjects in business schools. He is the head of Research at Fontys Business and Communication. Gerard Schouten is Professor of AI & data at Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Chair of the Centre of Expertise AI for Society. He earned his Ph.D. in the field of cognition and perception, and has extensive experience in applied research and teaching data- and AI-related topics.