Chief among them is the notion of design as service. In their book, the Design Way, Nelson and Stolterman write that design is about creating intentional change in the real world. As such, a designer must always work within limited time, resources and knowledge. And furthermore, design is never solitary, but is rather defined by dynamic relationships, working in service of others.

This is related to the idea of service learning, a method in which a student learns experientially by engaging in community service. I consider my capstone a service learning project in that my primary objective was to create a tangible result for the benefit of the IU community; any intellectual goals came secondary. Committing to this outcome put significant constraints on the project: technical, organizational and temporal. But by negotiating these constraints, I feel that I have learned a great deal about professional design practice.

For instance, I now have much deeper appreciation for the role of prototyping and strategy in design. In the HCI/d program, we use the PRICPS framework (Predispositions, Research, Insights, Concepts, Prototype and Strategy) as way to practice the essential components of a design argument. Most of the projects I’ve worked on in school have consisted of thorough exploration of PRIC, but usually stop short, leaving the PS as an afterthought at best. In contrast, this capstone was a great opportunity to immerse myself in prototyping and strategy.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO wrote a nice article about the core role of prototyping in design:

“Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it… the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we’re trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.”

I remember what my advisor, Eli Blevis, said when I first approached him about the energy contest: “Sounds great! Now go build it. ” I remember being a bit taken back. I suppose I am a person who tends to over-think and over-research details before acting, which is why I like to explore as many alternatives as possible in the early stages of design. However, in retrospect, it was the perfect advice. I already had the basic concept; what I needed to do was refine it, and the best way to refine is by prototyping.

Implementing a hi-fidelity, production prototype also gave me the opportunity to work though strategic elements of my design in a way that could not have happened otherwise. In putting on the Energy Challenge, the interactive component was really only one piece of the puzzle. I spent as much time, if not more, coordinating various stakeholders, planning the event, designing the promo poster and publicity, etc.

For a design to achieve success in the real world, social, technical, business and organizational contexts are as essential as user experience. The ability to integrate all these elements into a long-term strategic plan is an invaluable design skill that I hope to continue to develop throughout my career. Of all my experience in grad school, I am most proud to know that the IU Energy Challenge will endure so that this year’s modest successes might be improved on from year to year.

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.

While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

Reading the book from a design perspective, I’ve been thinking about all the individual decisions that have led us to the current system and the intentions behind them. My conclusion is that many creations of the food industry can be see as brilliant designs when viewed in context of an isolated problem. When you view those designs in the context of the wider system however, the appear in a different light.

For example, the invention of synthetic fertilizer would seem to be a brilliant solution to produce more food for humanity–until you consider the nitrogen flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey. Or on the other end, the invention of the supersize soda would seem to be a brilliant way to give consumers want they want and increase profits both–until you consider that one in three children today will develop diabetes. The design of fast food drive-thrus and cup-holders in cars may seem like a user-centered approach to accommodate our contemporary lifestyle. But when you reflect on the fact that 19% of American meals are now eaten in cars, I think its good cause to question the broader cultural values and practices that result from our individual design decisions.

In a complex world, designing responsibly means thinking systemically, and taking time to reflect on the wide-reaching unintended consequences that might result from action. As I’ve been discussing with my classmates, HCI discourse tends to focus on only the impact technology has to an individual user or organization, giving little attention to the broader societal impact. (Eli Blevis’ paper on sustainable interaction design may be the first well-recognized work to deal with this.) I wonder, how can we encourage systemic, long-term reflection in the design process? Can their be methods, tools, and exercises to help us anticipate unintended consequences?

I recall my early frustrations struggling with the design process. I’ve always been rather analytical and a bit perfectionist by nature. So when I first encountered a wide open design problem, I was struck by paralysis. I wanted to produce a well-reasoned solution on the first try, but this is of course impossible as in any design situation there are just too many possibilities and too many unknowns. By engaging with difficult designs in a dynamic exchange with teammates, I learned to take risks, to brainstorm, to explore multiple paths, refine scope and to slowly create order out of chaos.

I find it interesting that having become quite comfortable with this process in design, I never extended it to my writing. I’ve always struggled with analysis paralysis in writing. I tend to sit down and attempt to write perfect prose from the start, constantly editing every sentence as I go. Needless to say this is a grueling experience. Over time, I have improved a little bit–making a few outlines here and doing a little free-writing there. But overall, I still try to begin a writing process with highly structured logical thoughts.

The folly of this approach is now starkly evident. Last week, as Marty described stage 1 pre-writing activities–lists, sticky-storming, concept maps, sketches , etc–I immediately recognized them as the familiar tools of design ideation. And its obvious why they apply; the blank page is just the same as an open-ended design problem: a space of infinite possibility. The end result, in either case, is a highly rational argument. But a large part of the process is decidedly non-rational, and demands a natural evolution from chaos to order.

I can’t say I’ve fully adopted pre-writing into my routine. But I am fully convinced of its usefulness and determined to change my habits with conscious effort and practice.

As I remarked in my last post, seeing a concept independently replicated by someone else is a common experience, but one that inevitably provokes some reactions. In addition to feeling validated in my thinking (and a bit jealous that I couldn’t capitalize on the idea ;) , I am also caused to reflect on my creative development in the past year. It occurs to me that one year ago, upon seeing such a technology, I would have said to myself, “wow thats cool. how the hell do people think of such creative stuff?” And here I am today, looking and saying to myself, “yes thats cool. I thought of that too!”. I don’t mean this as to rest on my laurels and suggest that I’ve achieved some visionary abilities. Rather I just want to reflect on the process which enhances one’s creativity so that I can better continue to do so.

Coincidentally, a first-year student recently brought up this issue on one of the I541 blogs. I reproduce my comments here just so that I won’t forget these insights:

I felt exactly the same way at the beginning of the program. I always considered myself far more analytic than creative. I was the guy who questioned and shot ideas down rather than generating wild new concepts. Man, has a lot changed for me since then! While I still don’t consider myself any kind of artistic visionary, I now have a lot of confidence in my potential for imagination and creativity.

Reflecting on that change, one of biggest assets is as you noted: working with peers. Not only can their creativity be a source of inspiration, but learning to collaborate on really hard problems will seriously challenge you to step out of your comfortable habits and ways of thinking. On that note I would strongly encourage you to be a facilitator on one of the later projects. I found that being forced to lead a group in a creative process is a great way to pull some creativity out of yourself.

Another asset is what Marty has emphasized for project two: constraints. Counter to intuition, constraints really do enhance imagination. Why? Simply because under contraints, imagination is the only way achieve your design goals. This is where your analytic, or ‘devil’s advocate’ tendency can be of service. When you’re never satisfied with any idea, it propels you to keep trying, generating concept after concept until you’ve found a great one.

Of course there’s also time to suspend all analysis and criticism. Exercises like brainstorming are good for this, where ideas are repidly generated and no one is allowed to criticize.