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Sustainability
What does sustainable interaction look like?
In the past few years the design community has taken sustainability from a mere buzzword into a call for action. Eli Belvis, Tony Fry and Cooper's own David Fore have all championed the idea that the practice of interaction design must promote and encourage sustainable decision-making. The Designer's Accord has emerged as a mandate to turn the the goodwill into commitment and a plan of action, improving the role of design in sustainability.
This is all good, it's all needed, but we also need to get down to brass tacks. A cursory survey of the internets reveals a hunger for actionable discourse about sustainable interaction design. What does sustainable interaction design look like in the wild? What does sustainable mean when it comes to designing software? What are practical design choices that encourage sustainable behavior on the part of the end user of software?
Economizer: A Cooper service concept
People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.
This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.
Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)
Feeling passionate about Amazon’s Frustration-Free packaging
As my fellow Cooperistas will attest, I’m passionate about a lot of things: interaction design, birthday cake, shoes… But product packaging? No, I wouldn’t have included that last one in the list - at least, not until I caught myself swooning over Amazon’s new Frustration-Free packaging.
Suddenly, it all came back to me in a rush of emotion: the anger, frustration, and threat of serious injury when struggling to extract a tiny memory card from its giant plastic “clamshell” package. The tedium and anxiety of twisting countless plastic-coated wire ties in a seemingly never-ending effort to release toy components from incarceration before the child loses interest and starts playing with an empty box instead. The disbelief and disgust over the trail of excessive plastic waste left behind after opening a single product. And I am not alone. To tap into the packaging-frustration zeitgeist, Amazon has encouraged customers to post pictures and videos of their worst experiences to the Gallery of Wrap Rage, and the responses are pouring in.
These consumer-hostile packaging practices are a perfect example of business needs trumping user needs. For far too long, companies have designed packaging that serves only two masters: product marketing and theft reduction. Mark Hurst's This Is Broken features a particularly rich example of product packaging that fails to address the need to get the item out of the package.
Because Amazon doesn’t have to deal with retail display or shoplifting, they were in a unique position to sidestep the usual drivers for package design and think (pardon the pun) “outside the box”, focusing on customers’ goal of liberating products from the package so they can actually use them! And as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos notes in his letter to customers introducing the program, “in addition to making packages easier to open, a major goal of the Frustration-Free Packaging initiative is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material.” According to their FAQs, products with Frustration-Free Packaging can often be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.
Just in time for the holiday consume-a-thon, Amazon delivers human-friendly, eco-friendly package design. Now really, who wouldn’t be passionate about that?
What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments
Beautiful Monsters: Green vs. Green
Jonzing to take part in another 120-mile speed-skating race? You might have to wait 18 years, which is the likely interval between one Elfstedentocht and the next, owing to the effects of global warming.
As you wait for the ice to thicken, you can drive (in an energy-efficient manner) to one of the sustainable dance clubs popping up all over, and sweat your prayers.
So we can (almost all) agree the climate is changing. Not simply the climate that’s melting the ice, though. Also the economic climate, the one threatening to wash away your job. And the political climate, the one that can keep us all afloat.
Just a few months ago, business leaders habitually dismissed arguments in favor of ecologically responsible development because they were too busy pumping gobs of money out of the ground. Now that the price of oil has plummeted along with the rosy profit forecasts from Reykjavik to Whitefish, guess what some “hard-nosed realists” argue? You got it! Investing in clean- and green-tech is now unwise because of the credit tsunami sucking all the cash out to sea, an economic recession that promises to be as deep as it will be broad, hyperventilating stock markets, dazed and confused finance ministers, and a crumbling government in Washington that’s trying to bring down thousands of animal and plant species with it.
Who has time for the love of bugs and bunnies when the sky is falling and you’ve got mouths to feed! When the weather’s fine, there’s no apparent need to fix the leak in the roof. And, anyway, you’re too busy enjoying the sunshine. But when it’s raining nobody wants to go out on a slippery roof. In other words, it’s hard to set aside the time to look ahead. But in times of turmoil we all want to know what’s coming around the bend.
The best way to predict the future, as everyone knows, is to make it yourself. Particularly if you’re a designer, since your job is to anticipate future needs and desires and create what fits the bill.
Beautiful Monsters: Check your assumptions at the door
Every product, service, or business model is defined in large measure by what designers take for granted. These assumptions can be held so deeply as to be invisible to the designers themselves. And yet their acknowledgment, and negotiation, are key to industrial evolution, profit, and harmonious relationships to various ecosystems.
In the early days, for instance, you could assume that those with access to computers were backed by organizations willing to invest the funds necessary to acquire or build the complex infrastructure required by computational behemoths. But with the advent of microprocessors and other such developments, that all changed. Now the intrusion of computers into every corner of our lives is nearly complete, with 11 percent of the people recently polled saying they’d like their email deliver directly into their brains in the ultimate post-media consumer fad.
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.
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.
"How would our federal government respond if 1 out of every 3 cows was dying?" a scientist recently asked a bovine Congress.
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?
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.
By any medium necessary: How interaction designers can save the world
An email from on high hits your inbox: the company is kicking off an initiative to "radically improve" the effectiveness and efficiency of its nationwide sales force.
Nothing new here, you think. This sort of thing sweeps over the land every few years, like locusts.
But as you drag the message into your Deleted folder, something new catches the eye. Your design team is being asked to carry out the first step of the initiative: conducting a research project to "gather requirements" for how to make the organization more effective.
Undo! Undo!
Aside from the fact that requirements are defined and not "gathered" (one pictures wine bottles hanging from grapevines), it's surprisingly level-headed to turn to interaction designers to examine organizational needs and propose solutions. Most of the time, it's business analysts and technology specialists who are tapped for these assignments. Analysts collect information about what makes the business tick; technologists, meanwhile, build and/or choose tools that work within a given infrastructure. But while the work of analysts and technologists is necessary, it is not sufficient. That's because they are rarely trained (much less asked) to describe usage contexts, identify goals, or design tools that satisfy people while also meeting the objectives of organizations. The result? Too often it's a new flavor of the same old thing, just more expensive this time around.