One of the biggest pleasures of working on the IU Energy Challenge has been getting tapped into the broader initiative to promote environmental sustainability on the IUB campus. This summer, I am honored to continue this effort by participating in the second summer internship program sponsored by the Sustainability Task force. I will be joining 19 energetic students from diverse backgrounds, who will each be working on projects to bring sustainable initiatives into various aspects of campus operations and academics. My particular project will be a continuation of my capstone work; I will be looking at ways to leverage utility data to raise awareness about resource consumption on campus.
In addition to the project work, all the interns will be meeting in a weekly seminar, where we have open-ended discussions, guest speakers, and occasional trips to green networking events in the state. Its basically a high-energy think tank for campus sustainability. We will be blogging about our discussion here. All in all, it promises to be a very engaging and productive summer.
I just found out that I have advanced to the final round of the 2008 Microsoft Imagine Cup Interface Design competition. The theme of this year’s competition is “Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment”. My design (submitted along with teammate Will Odom) is part of my capstone work creating an energy conservation contest for IU campus. We will be one of 6 teams to compete in the world finals in Paris, France later this summer. Here is the abstract that we submitted with our prototype: Continue »
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. Continue »