Sustainability is a hot topic. Partial credit goes to Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that preceded the movie. In the world of human-computer interaction, designers are now thinking deeply about the consequences of their creations.
Last spring, IU School of Informatics professor Eli Blevis presented his research paper—”Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse“— to the international CHI community in San Jose, California. This seminal work jump-started formal research about how design and sustainability are related.
The key values of the paper are in its extensive literature review and in providing a framework for sustainable design:
- Promoting renewal & reuse—examining the consequence of discard
- Promoting quality & equality—affect and longevity, motivating prolonged value
- De-coupling ownership & identity—increased importance of shared experiences
- Using natural models & reflection—promote sustainable behavior
Blogger Samuel Mann published a nice synopsis of Eli’s paper, which includes a rubric for evaluating products and an extensive review of existing literature.
Sustainable design isn’t as easy as following a framework or measuring outcomes with a rubric, however. Design is a systemic act, involving many things outside of the control of the designer, such as market economy and practical use.
Going green is made easier by the increasing number of products that reflect an environmental consciousness. But, words like green, environmental and sustainable are in danger being applied too liberally and devolving into marketing catch phrases (like organic before it). A product may use one sustainable component for every two that cause harm. A company may continue profiting from environmentally dangerous items and use a single sustainable item as a gimmick to offset public relations damage. There is a lot of trust consumers have to give to companies to make their good intentions meaningful.
Not everyone benefits from greening the world, either. Saving the rain forests has been a banner of environmentalists since concepts like ozone and global warming were first introduced to mainstream vocabulary. Indigenous communities are affected not only by corporat mining and logging damages, but also by philanthropic efforts to save these special habitats. The Yanomami are claiming mental and physical hardships due to resettlement away from traditional lands, conjuring up images of the Cherokee being forced to trek across our young country to reservations in Oklahoma. They accuse organizations like Cool Earth of “green colonialism” through their practice of buying up rain forest land and displacing tribes.
The mainstream conversation is still focused on asking the wrong questions about global warming. We need to move beyond the if it is happening to when it is happening. The model many people have about the effects of our consumption habits is a broken refrigerator. We think of polar ice caps melting and record temperatures as something that is correctable by changing a motor or turning back on the power after an outage, as if the damages were immediately reversible and salvageable. Instead, we need to think of global warming as a decision made in the past that has consequences that will get worse before it gets better, like being caught on a congested highway and having to endure the traffic jam until either it clears or we reach our final destination.
The purpose of Eli’s landmark paper is not to prescribe a cure for our environmental ills or to suggest that a radical change of practice by designers, companies and consumers will prevent what is now an inevitable planetary shift in ecological balance. His ideas on sustainable design are meant to bring to light the past efforts in these areas as it applies to the design of thing, and to promote ongoing conversation about how we need to incorporate sustainable thinking into the things we make. We need to know at the point of conception of an object that the things we create involve the destruction or displacement of something else. Sustainability is about understanding and incorporating the consequences of such creation into the design.
There are over 14,000 blogs participating in Blog Action Day today. Their estimated reach is over 12 million readers. There is still time left in the day to post your own commentary on sustainability, as it pertains to your areas of interest. Need some inspiration? Try this list of resources, and keep the conversation going.
