Beautiful Monsters: Be the change

The Market Street grid, Courtesy: bricoleurbanism.

This week, San Francisco started choosing sides for another Market Street Mêlée, which we fight once every ten years or so. On one side of the double-yellow line are arrayed various assorted starry-eyed, bipedal dreamers who propose closing down the main artery of our fair city to most carbon-emitting traffic so as to give pedestrians and bicyclists a break, reduce pollution, and increase the beauty and overall mellow vibe of the grid. On the other side stand the self-styled hard-nosed rationalists who see in this as a pedal-powered economic and moral calamity in the making.

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Beautiful Monsters: The odds are in

Beautiful Monsters is a series by David Fore, head of Cooper's consulting practice. It is intended encourage conversation about how interaction designers can grow more sustainable practices, with the goals of improving our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet. Start at the beginning, or read the latest installment below.

Critics may charge that I’m loving on WunderMap too much. But these guys have vision. They provide fantastic resources for visualizing many of the changes afoot, which is a necessary precursor to visualizing solutions. But what they haven’t done yet is provide us the coordinates of our honeybees, one in three of which have disappeared from these parts. Without honeybees we don’t have agriculture as we know it — and, ipso facto, culture.

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Beautiful Monsters: Why on earth does this matter?

It used to be that everybody talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Not anymore. Through the magic of technology, I am empowered to make better decisions about where not to breathe. That’s because the good people at WunderMap have devised a smoke map. For a few days there, the smoke from local wildfires were absorbed by our (formerly) infinitely capacious atmosphere. So I didn’t think I’d need the smoke map. But then temperatures hit new epochal records, humidity took a dive, and the wind began fanning the flames again.

Should our misfortunes expand to include plagues of frogs, boils, and gnats, I know WunderMap will have my back.

In other news last week, the U.S. continued to emit vivid plumes of interactive graphics displaying our industrial might, which nobody can deny … it’s just that my emissions are necessary, while yours are not. World leaders at the G8 Summit in Japan, meanwhile, decided to postpone serious action on climate change for another few decades. Tomorrow’s always the best day to begin a diet.

Why on earth should such things matter to interaction designers? Put another way, why does earth matter to interaction designers?

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Beautiful Monsters: With such a late start, we best get moving

From our position at the confluence of human desire, technology, and business, interaction designers can make a tremendously positive—or negative—impact on the biggest issues facing us today: the sustainability of commerce, human societies, and natural systems. Despite these opportunities, software makers are discouraged from thinking outside the aspect ratio of the computer ’s monitor.

This is the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design to improve our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet.

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