Exhibition on Digital Sobriety in ESR
Apr 27, 2026
GRICAD pays particular attention to issues of digital sobriety. As such, our unit supports you in assessing the environmental footprint of your digital activities, as well as in implementing a digital sobriety policy tailored to your projects or your laboratory.
Eleven posters raising awareness about digital sobriety
As part of this initiative, GRICAD has been heavily involved in creating a mobile exhibition dedicated to digital sobriety. Comprising eleven posters, this exhibition is aimed at higher education and research staff, as well as students. This project was born out of an initiative led by the Toulouse Institute for Research in Computer Science (IRIT), with the support of the University of Grenoble Alpes (VerIT Project). It also received co-funding from the CNRS, the VerIT project, IRIT and GRICAD, as part of the CNRS’s Call for Initiatives for Environmental Transition in 2024. The aim of this project is to raise awareness of digital sobriety through the creation of A0-format posters. These posters, designed and produced to maximise their environmental impact, are intended to be displayed permanently in computer science laboratory buildings. They may also be displayed in temporary exhibitions in other laboratories or for university students.
Building a sustainable digital world that respects life
This exhibition explores a set of knowledge that needs to be acquired in order to build a sustainable digital approach that respects life. It is structured around several key stages: First, life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is necessary to understand the environmental impacts of the different phases of the life cycle of digital equipment. This basis is detailed in poster 2, which identifies the critical points to be analysed when reading LCA results. Life cycle analyses and other impact calculation méthodologies provide qualitative and quantitative results on the main impacts: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, etc. These results are illustrated in poster 3. The exhibition then broadens the discussion to include the social and health impacts of digital technology (poster 4) and proposes to analyse the knock-on effects of implementing a digital solution (poster 5). This approach allows us to adopt a global vision, which is necessary to rethink our practices and avoid repeating the mistakes that led us to exceed planetary boundaries. On an operational level, changing practices requires knowledge of the issues and Tools related to data (poster 6), digital services (poster 7, with the example of AI) and the eco-design of digital services (poster 8). Finally, to be fully equipped, we felt it was important to identify the obstacles and barriers to digital sobriety, which is the subject of poster 9. Poster 10 explores the range of solutions through ecological redirection. Finally, poster 11 brings the reader back to the reality of conducting research by addressing the assessment of the footprint of a research project in computer science or one that relies heavily on digital technology.
Would you like to borrow a set of posters for your organisation? Contact Francoise.Berthoud@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr