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.

“From March 20 to April 17 2008, more than 9,000 students living in Indiana University dormitories competed to reduce their energy and water consumption in IU’s first-ever Campus Energy Challenge. Throughout the competition, the Energy Challenge Website provided frequent updates on consumption data, competition standings, and conservation tips. This dynamic web-application evokes a sense of fun and motivation by giving students helpful feedback that supports and encourages their conservation efforts. At the end of four weeks, students conserved an estimated 446,139 KWh of electricity and 613,919 gallons of water. Remarkably, the students’ conservation efforts resulted in an estimated $26,000 in avoided utility costs and 801,454 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, which is equivalent to taking 67 passenger cars off the road for one year.

The site design features dynamic, interactive data graphics, which allow students to easily compare their consumption with other dorms and track changes over time. The site also includes a list of suggested conservation actions and educational information to raise awareness about climate change and other environmental consequences of resource use. While many information visualization tools exist, rarely has this type of interface been designed for non-experts in mind, and for the purpose of motivating environmental action. Through competition and an engaging user experience, the Energy Challenge Website seeks to transform perception of the basic resources on which we depend—and so often take for granted—and make them visible, valuable and meaningful.”

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.

EcoDrive collects all necessary data relating to vehicle efficiency and, through Blue&Me’s USB gate, transmits it into a normal USB key. The driver plugs this into a PC. The “EcoDrive” system presents the driver with detailed environmental performance of the car including the CO2 emission level for each trip. It analyses the driver’s style and then provides tips and recommendations on how to modify style to achieve CO2 reductions – and save money on fuel.

EcoDrive will encourage the driver to set himself challenges – CO2 reduction targets for specific journeys or over a set period of time. And in a community site will encourage all drivers to come together and pool their savings – working towards much bigger collective targets and showing that a lot of small contributions join to have a massive impact.

Like our CHI project, EcoDrive allows the user to set challenges and compare their progress with others. This social influence could be a powerful feature. A key difference of our project is that it offers real-time feedback displayed on the windshield during the act of driving. EcoDrive appears to be completely asynchronous, with feedback displayed on the home computer. However, given that Microsoft recently applied to patent a windshield head-up display, I wouldn’t be surprised if we do see a real-time eco-driving HUD hit the market in the near future.

Lucky for Bloomington residents, this weekend’s conference plenaries are being broadcast live via satellite to IU (click here for details). I stopped in today and checked out a provocative talk by Jay Hartmann, CEO of PAX scientific. PAX is an industrial design firm that uses patterns found in nature to improve industrial products. As Hartmann explained, millions of years of evolution have resulted in forms and systems that are unparalleled by human technology in their elegance and efficiency. PAX studies these ‘optimized geometries’ and applies them to design cleaner, more efficient and benign industrial products. For example the natural spirals have been used to create better fans with a variety of applications.

This overall approach to industrial design is known as Biomimicry and has been written about by Janine Benyus (see more here). Of course the strategy of using natural models as a means to design sustainably is not new. Permaculture design is based on this approach applied to food production, landscaping, and land-use. In the context of architecture, Christopher Alexander advocated for structure preserving transformations in his book Nature of Order. And most recently, Alexander’s work has inspired Eli Blevis to include the principle of “using natural models and reflection” in his manifesto for Sustainable Interaction design.

Hartmann’s talk suggests that this approach is gaining traction in the industrial world, which can only have positive implications for sustainability.

In addition to revealing the darker side of industrial food production, I think his essay also speaks to a larger conflict in achieving sustainability: modern industry (and infrastructure and bureaucracy) is large scale and highly compartmentalized. In contrast, sustainable systems informed by ecology should be small scale and tightly integrated. Developing sustainment means adopting this ecological model in our political, cultural, and economic practices.

One of the highlights for me, was J. Anthony Langlois’ talk, “Reactive environments through politicized artworks”. Langlois’ argument was as follows: We (as a culture) need to change. In order to change we must have dialogue. In order to have effective dialogue, we need to be informed. He then described artistic attempts to “make the invisible visible” by way of eye-catching (often new-media based) visualization of otherwise unseen data. His examples were diverse and provocative: energy orbs, networked umbrellas, cameras in drag, to name a few. Data visualization has been an interest of mine for some time, particularly persuasive visualization to motivate sustainable behavior. Coming from an artistic background, Langlois’ angle was a slightly different. The examples he gave were not meant to motivate particular behaviors, aid in specific task, or even convey any exact message. Rather they were meant for the viewer to take notice, react viscerally, and then ask important questions. This is an interesting perspective which I hope to explore in my work.

Later in the afternoon, Kristin Hanks and I presented our undergraduate survey research, “attitudes toward sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies.” While many of the conference goers opted for the other session at the time, we did have a sizable audience of Rose undergrads. As a nice complement to our talk, James Adams of Troy University presented some survey results on undergrad opinions on sustainability. His conclusion was that the majority of students care about sustainability, although they aren’t quite sure what it means. After our presentation, we had some positive feedback from the academics in the audience, which developed in some interesting conversations about the complexity of achieving sustainable technology.

All in all, it was a fun conference with multidisciplinary perspectives on sustainability.

While the effort to retrofit existing technologies into less harmful ones is often well-intentioned, it can be problematic when it tends to perpetuate the larger unsustainable structures of our culture. As cars become more efficient, they only extend our sprawl lifestyle; resulting in wasteful and destructive land development, inefficient transportation of goods, increased isolation, etc. etc. A modifed plug-in toyota prius earning 100 mpg is just as guilty as the hummer in this equation (not to mention my own design for an for oxymoronically named ‘eco-driving’ dashboard)…

Opposing this dynamic is a serious challenge now that green has become mainstream (which certainly you must have noticed). Politicians, businesspeople, technologists, everyone suddenly concerned about global warming will be tempted into applying old-school techno-centered fixes to problems that truly demand something greater and deeper. I offer Baron Hill’s words at Bloominton’s Step-it-Up event last Saturday as evidence. The Indiana congressmen exclaimed that “we have the technology” to stop climate change, referencing hybrid and bio-diesel. He went on with some empty ramblings that did more to point fingers at India and China than to encourage responsible action. Bush’s plan to cure our oil-addiction with more corn monoculture is even more insidious. Its a sad day when a communist dictator has saner energy insight than our democratically-elected leader.

If we are to have any hope for sustainment, we need to more serious critical reflection about how we got here. Car culture seems to me to be the best place to start. In that spirit, I’d like to commend the designers at greenhummerproject.org. A green hummer worth the name, their sexy vehicle may be painted yellow but has zero emissions and more importantly provokes some thoughts for all who encounter it.

For me personally at least, key encounters with information seem to have drastically altered my path in life. My interest in sustainability, for example, I can almost completely attribute to three simple graphs that were shown to me by Prof. David Haberman in the spring of 2005.

The first one represented global population. It looked something like this:

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The second one I believe represented resource consumption per capita. The shape was very similar to the first.

The third one (and this one was the kicker) represented species loss. It looked a bit like this:

Like Galileo’s sun spot maps, the three graphs taken together formed a ‘visible proof’ about the world. It was a moment of what Edward Tufte might call ‘beautiful evidence’. The inference was simple to make: unrestrained growth is destroying life on earth. This bit of knowledge, which could be illustrated through a few statistics, was something that I had been completely ignorant about. Once I encountered it, however, my whole way of seeing, thinking, and acting were changed. It is moments like these that inspire me as a designer.

Of course, information, data or statistics alone do not inevitably evoke such a response. The design of the encounter is of as much importance. Visual presentation must be clearly and intelligently designed to communicate effectively. Tufte’s books contain a wealth of insight on how to do this (see especially the principles of analytic design found in Beautiful Evidence). When it comes to designing interactive technologies, I think the possibilities and challenges both are multiplied. Gapminder’s compelling interface to world development data demonstrates some of rich possibilities afforded by interactivity.

However, even if design succeeds in communicating some cognitive knowledge, this does not mean that it will have any lasting effect on a person…