David Roedl

This essay is about the challenge of making environmental sustainability a focus of HCI research and practice. While environmental concerns have been around for a long time and have been considered important in other design disciplines like architecture and product design, the topic has only recently been recognized in the HCI community. It is also a very complex topic, posing a number of difficult theoretical questions. For example, it demands that we first understand the complex issue of how HCI design is currently impacting the environment. Second, we need to understand how concerns for these impacts can be effectively integrated into the design process. Finally, we need to develop insights and concepts for designing more sustainable interactive products. In this paper I look to the literature of design theory to provide insights into these three problems. Sustainability can and has been considered from many perspectives: political, economic, biological, technical, spiritual. My goal here is to describe my understanding of the issue of sustainability through the lens of design theory.

To begin, what impact does HCI have on the environment and what is the role and responsibility of the designer in this situation? The environmental problems stemming from producing, using, and discarding electronic products are well-documented. These may include the depletion of natural resources, emission of greenhouse gases, and release of toxic chemicals. However, design theory often overlooks the material circumstances of the production-consumption cycle by focusing solely on the intellectual process of creating and documenting ideas. This is especially the case in interaction design when the output of design–computer software–is made of digital rather than physical material. This in no way exempts interaction design from environmental concerns, however, because all software is closely connected and dependent on the use of physical computer hardware. Software products do have immense environmental impact, but indirectly through their interaction with hardware products [1].

Krippendorf [3] pays special attention to the material consequences of design in his theory on the “context of genesis. ” Following the laws of thermodynamics, he points out that the creation of any product necessarily consumes energy and produces waste: “all production requires work but irreversibly increases entropy and pollution. ” He further observes that “all artifacts are ultimately retired, recycled or decomposed and collectively influence the environment in unintended and barely understood ways. ” Unfortunately, in the case of interactive technology this process happens all too quickly and at huge cost. Computers require great amounts of energy and resources to produce, but are quickly discarded as new models render them obsolete.

This ecological cost can be considered as one example of, in the language of Nelson and Stolterman [5], “the evil of design. “ According to the authors, design is evil whenever undesired consequences are brought into the world or when balance and harmony are disrupted. Environmental degradation certainly qualifies as evil under this definition. Nelson and Stolterman point out that evil can occur even when a design is considered good in many other ways. They also classify three different forms of evil, all of which can be found contributing to unsustainability. Natural evil refers to the necessary and unavoidable loss that occurs anytime something new is created. Whenever a new interactive technology is designed something older will be obsolesced and possibly discarded as waste, a dynamic that Blevis has described as “linking invention and disposal. ” Accidental evil happens as a result of “ignorance, carelessness or inattention. ” This is perhaps the most common reason for unsustainable design as designers fail to consider the complex material consequences of production and consumption. Finally, willful evil refers to intentionally harmful acts of design such as when a designer knowingly creates environmentally destructive products in the pursuit of personal profit.

Considering entropy and the various potential evils of design, avoiding ecological harm seems a difficult if not impossible task for interaction designers. To minimize environmental impact, a designer must anticipate wide-reaching, systemic interactions that are not typically considered within the scope of the average design project. Nelson and Stolterman describe the many ways that designers often try relieve themselves of moral responsibility for the broad emergent consequences of design action. However, because there are no absolutes to rely on, they argue that “designers must learn to accept design responsibility as something integral to each designer’s character. ” Thus, because even small design acts can have far-reaching destructive consequences for humanity and the biosphere, all interaction designers are ethically responsible to make a conscious effort towards sustainability.

If the issue of sustainability is by definition long-term, wide-reaching, systemic, and complex, how can we ensure that it is integrated and adequately addressed in the design process? An ecological approach to design requires reflection on such disparate factors as the type and sourcing of materials, the process of manufacture and distribution, intended and possibly unintended uses, the longevity of use, potential for recycling or disposal, etc. In contrast, current HCI methods are rather narrowly focused on a single user interacting with a system in a predefined context. True, a few approaches such as Activity Theory and Situated Action seek to understand more emergent, social aspects of the design situation. However, they are still confined primarily to immediate work settings, and have reportedly been too complex to easily integrate into practice [6].

To avoid potentially disastrous ecological effects, interaction designers need practical design-oriented methods that help them understand and anticipate systemic interactions. One promising approach is Blevis’s Sustainable Interaction Design framework, in which he provides a rubric of possible material effects and several design principles to be used in both design criticism and critical design [1]. Another promising framework is currently being developed by Nathan et al [4] called Value Scenarios. It involves the use of scenarios to consider possible long-term outcomes, indirect stakeholders, pervasiveness, and value implications that may arise from new technologies. The benefit of both of these methods is that they can be flexibly applied in practice to generate design insights and do not require an over-burdening amount of theoretical knowledge.

Ultimately, no method or theory can be relied to guarantee a benign and sustainable outcome: “there are no theories, methods, techniques, or tools that can calculate, predict or envision the truly best future reality” [5]. Instead, designers must rely on their character–their personal beliefs, values and skills, cultivated through reflective practice [7]. A strong adherence to values can be compromised by an organizational system which places a designer in a limited role with predefined desiderata. A consideration of values can also be compromised when an engineering approach to design is taken that assumes a narrow, a priori criterion for success like functionalism or usability. Nevertheless, a designer must cultivate a strong character of leadership in order to work within organizational constraints and affect change.

Assuming that a designer is able to effectively integrate sustainability into practice, what insights and concepts have potential for creating sustainable interactions? If transformation towards entropy is an inevitable process, then the goal for sustainable design is to pursue strategies that “slow down the inevitable processes of decay. “ Krippendorf suggests several recommendations to this end, including designing products that can adapt to user’s changing needs, can direct their own recycling, and that prevent the needless decay of other artifacts [3]. Similarly, Verbeek [8] suggest four different approaches to ecodesign: lifecycle analysis, shifting from products to services, recycling, and extending the service life of products. This last aim of extending service life is an important strategy for slowing down the process of decay by designing products which are culturally durable, in the sense that they inspire care-taking and longevity of use. There are many different ideas and approaches expressing the qualities that make a design culturally durable. Some of these include beauty, meaning, symbolism, value, wholeness, and ensoulment [5].

One particularly well-developed theory for designing products that inspire care is Verbeek’s notion of a material aesthetics. Verbeek is primarily concerned with the way technologies mediate our actions and experience with the world in a sensorial way. He argues that the “psychological lifetime ” of products can best be extended not by symbolism, but by directly involving people in their functioning. He advocates for products that are transparent, such that they invite renewal and repair and that are moreover engaging in that they allow the person to relate to the product as a material, rather than purely functional or symbolic object.

These are promising strategies, however extending the psychological lifetime of products is not a sufficient solution to sustainability by itself. All interactive technology will eventually lose its functionality and be recycled, decomposed or else become pollution. More importantly, culture is dynamic and ever-changing. Humans, at least in recent history, are predisposed towards constant improvement of existing technology [2]. Culture evolves, and over time, people come to prefer newer designs and ideas. At some point, older patterns in design will no longer fit into the cultural ecology and will be retired. Sustainable design can effectively slow down this process of decay and obsolescence, but it cannot stop it. Thus, we must design for graceful decomposition as well as longevity of use.

Blevis’ principle of learning from natural systems is informative in this case. In natural ecosystems, energy is constantly in flux as matter is transforming from one state to another in a complex system. No individual organism endures forever, but no energy or matter is effectively wasted either. Everything is used to its maximum efficiency and reused in cycles of successive destruction and creation. Following this model, we can say that the challenge of sustainability is not so much to ensoul objects as it to ensoul material in the most universal sense. Objects will necessarily come and go, but if people are inspired with respect and appreciation for the basic resources of matter and energy, then perhaps they will invest care and maintenances of their world as a whole, using everything to its maximal efficiency and preventing harmful waste and destruction. To me, this notion of appreciating all matter is synonymous with the design vision of connecting each detail to the larger whole: “To see the world holistically, as a divine wholeness, where every single aspect of the totality of experience is also seen as a member of, or even the same thing as, the divine” [5]. This is the vision which inspires my design philosophy and character.

References
1. Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems:503-512.
2. Friedel, R. (2007). The Culture of Improvement — Technology and the Western Millennium. The MIT Press. Friedman, K. (2003). Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods. In Design Studies 24 (2003) 507-522.
3. Krippendorff, K. (1989). On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition That “Design Is Making Sense (Of Things)” Design Issues, Vol. 5, No. 2. (Spring, 1989), pp. 9-39.
4. Nathan, Lisa P., Predrag V. Klasnja, and Batya Friedman.(2007). Value scenarios: a technique for envisioning systemic effects of new technologies. CHI ‘07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems.
5. Nelson, H. & Stolterman, E. (2003). The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. Educational Technology Publications.
6. Rogers, Yvonne, (2005) New Theoretical Approaches for HCI, ARIST: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, no 38, 2004. http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/yrogers/papers/ARIST_Rogers.pdf
7. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York, NY. Basic Books.
8. Verbeek, P-P, (2005). What Things Do — Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. The Pennsylvania State University Press.