My podcast portrait - Sustainable lens

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At the CHI conference in Paris, back in the end of April, I was interviewed by Samuel Mann for his podcast "Sustainable lens: Resilience on radio". Sustainable lens is a pretty narrow podcast, it only features researchers who in one way or another are involved in sustainability as well as oftentimes also computing. It's possible to download the Sustainable lens podcasts from the homepage or to subscribe to them through Itunes. Each podcast is 60 minutes long.

There is now a 60-minute podcast with me that can be downloaded from the homepage. The podcast that features me was published before the summer, but it had an inexplicable period of 12 minutes that was silent, so I delayed publishing this blog post. That has now been fixed and if you (for some reason) can't get enough of me, I recommend that you download and listen to "my" podcast.


I do however have some critique against Samuel's podcasts in general, and this critique applies also to the podcast with me. My number one problem is that the podcasts seem not to be very focused. I'm a university teacher and a researcher. Part of my profession is to talk, and I can talk about many different topics as well as a long time about each. The things I talk about in this podcast however feels a bit, well, random. I can't really see a strong direction behind the questions. Also and related is the fact that Samuel asks too few questions. It becomes less of a dialogue/conversation, and more of a monologue. After each question, the interviewee can easily talk for five or more minutes. The result is that these interviews can veer between different topics and feel a bit directionless. When I listen to my podcast, I notice that I talk a lot about virtual communities, about games and about teaching. This is not however necessarily the topics I would have liked to talk the most about in a show about computers and sustainability, but we never came around to those other topics before we ran out of time. Perhaps I need to prepare and think through things better before I'm interviewed next time...

On the positive side is the fact that this a podcast that is very narrow but happens to be right up my alley because of my interest in both sustainability and ICT. Samuel has managed to snag a lot of interesting researchers for his podcast and I commend him for that!
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