Tega Brain is an Assistant Professor, artist, environmental engineer, and has experience building computational projects that address energy use and sustainability. This project builds on her ongoing research by leveraging technology to improve environmental health. Benedetta Piantella is an Industry Assistant Professor with ten years of experience in the design and deployment of open source hardware/software solutions that address social challenges in low resource settings globally and developing curricula that uses design to solve large real-world problems. This project builds on her current research around wireless local networks, information sharing, and community resilience. Alex Nathanson is an NYU Tandon alumni, multimedia artist, A/V engineer, technologist, and educator. As an educator he has worked with students from K to graduate level and beyond, teaching skills related to electronics and solar technologies for creative expression. His thesis project for the IDM Program included an extremely in-depth study on the use of solar in media arts.

Solar Powered Media is a research project aimed at investigating the environmental impacts of online media content and the associated network infrastructure.The myth that our online activities have no cost, both environmentally and economically, is constantly reinforced by concepts like “the cloud” and by the myriads of online companies offering supposedly free accounts, free data storage and free services. This project tries to address these misconceptions, investigating the environmental footprint of our dependency to online platforms and their energy consumption, something that is rapidly expanding due to languages like Javascript, streaming media, analytics and more recently, highly processor heavy techniques like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. As far back as 2008, the digital footprint of the internet already exceeded that of the aviation industry and it goes without saying that this has significant impacts on climate change as the role of the internet continues to expand in all aspects of our lives.

This project investigates and prototypes the design and physical installation of a solar powered server to host web resources for the Integrated Digital Media Program at New York University. We are using open source hardware and software components powered by a small size photovoltaic system, taking inspiration from precedent projects like Low Tech Magazine’s Solar Powered Website. We will integrate this work on the environmental costs of digital media and sustainable Web/UX design practices into our IDM classes and make curricular resources available to the general public to reach a wider audience.

To date we have conducted some initial background research and discovered that there is a significant amount of uncertainty and disagreement when it comes to analyzing the energy consumption of information and communication technology (ICT) and even more when looking specifically at server energy consumption. We have then spent time delving into several commonly used methods for investigating ICT energy consumption, each with their own pros and cons and documented our findings. In the process, we also looked at what components of a website are most power consuming and we’ve started a running list of interesting conferences, venues, publications and other resources that are in line with the work we are doing and that could be interesting to the community at large. We are currently in the process of setting up our own framework for benchmarking and testing and have successfully installed a benchtop prototype of our small PV powered server in our office window and began developing and installing open source software to log data from the solar power system and display it in a human-friendly way via a solar powered server. Our designs, hardware choices and software packages will be available online on the Solar Powered Media project website. 

We’re now working on incorporating our findings but also our challenges into the Integrated Digital Media Program UX/UI course for the fall 2019 as we will be devising some design challenges for students to tackle head on in order to reflect on how stylistic choices and design decisions affect our environment when creating digital media content.

NYU Green Grants are awarded to improve the university’s operational environmental performance, foster environmental literacy and community engagement, advance applied research and design, and demonstrate the viability of best practices and technologies for sustainability. The Green Grants Selection Committee awards up to $20,000 for the most feasible, impactful, and innovative projects that have potential for institutionalization on campus or are self-sustaining.