Abstract

Sustainability is a broad term. In this post I talk about environmental sustainability issues. We as designers can play a large role in creating an eco-friendlier world.

When people think of design, they tend to think of artifacts. I think these artifacts are important, but merely a result.

We need to design the design process, production process and people’s behavior. This post is about the processes and artifacts. I’ll talk about behavior change in another post.

As a soon-to-be father I have enough reason to worry every now and then. Not only do I worry about my girlfriend and son’s health during birth. I also ponder about the consequences of my generation’s consumerism behavior and how that will affect the circumstances in which my son will live the latter part of his life.

These days, people in well developed countries together use more energy than is sustainable for the world’s entire population. Only when we manage to innovate our solutions in a greener and more eco-friendly way, this climate crisis can be solved before it will show its darkest side. Energy usage is not the only problem. Other subjects like pollution and excessive resource consumption need to be tamed as well.

Environmental problems

In the introduction above I addressed three problems that need to be tackled. Speaking of environmental problems, these are the main causes of the non-circular system.

We designed this straight-line growth model

Designers played a responsible role in these causes and effects. We created this consumerism world ourselves. Annie Leonard talks about this in The story stuff, a viral 20-minute talk which I’ve pasted below.

Annie’s point is simple and straightforward: the world economy follows a straight-line growth model based on planned obsolescence, while the world itself prefers to work in a circular symbiotic relationship.

‘Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.’
Victor Lebow, Retail Analyst (Price Competition in 1955)

Designing sustainable solutions

In order to design and build sustainable solutions we need to keep in mind a few markers that can help us bring structure in the process. We should:

• build products that last;
• create things that can be repaired;
• make stuff that can be recycled or reused;
• not use toxics during our production process;
• use green energy since natural resources are scarce.

Build to last

We’re talking about sustainability here, and how we can make people behave sustainable. Did you know that for years (and even now) many companies deliberately create products that have a short lifetime? Personal computers have long been deliberately designed for replacement every eighteen months.

Planned obsolescence

Bruce Sterling wrote a great piece about this in his book ‘Tomorrow now’. He explains that the short lifetime was not only in the interest of the people who make them, but also the managerial and programming classes that use them. If computers lasted forever and were simple to use, the high-paying jobs in e-commerce would immediately migrate to India (that’s actually happening right now, and computers do last longer).

Websites die even faster than computers do, the average life span for a website on the internet lasts 40 days. Did you know that these websites are saved on servers all over the world sometimes for years? We often think that information on the internet is clean, but these websites are stored in server parks that are run by stinking diesel engines.

Repair instead of replace

This reminds me of a great story that I heard at the awesome design for conversion conference last year in Amsterdam. Paul Hughes told and sketched a story about a 150 year old architectural design solution on the Oxford University grounds.

Oxford University sustainable design solution

On the terrain of the Oxford University in England you can find numerous beautiful monumental buildings. One of these buildings, a 150 year old hall needed to have its ceilings renovated. The ceilings contain huge oak beams, about 100 in total. These oak beams would cost the University more than 100.000 British Pounds each!

There seemed no solution at hand, nobody knew what to do. The complete investment, including the renovation itself would be much too costly to do.

During one of their housing counsel meetings, which also includes gardening and forestry issues, one of the foresters started to grin. The counsel listened to his story. He explained that the architect of the huge 150 year old hall had also designed a huge oak forest not too far from the Oxford University terrain. These oaks were planted to actually replace the oaks in the ceiling of the Oxford University hall.

A beautiful example of sustainable design.

Recycle and reuse

When a product’s lifetime has come to an end in it’s normal intended form we can find new purposes. As a designer we can think about that second lifetime already when designing for it’s intended first lifetime. This second lifetime can go for the product as a whole but also as seperate parts. Just like the Oxford architect did.

We can design products that give purpose to products that ran out of time. Ubuntu, for example, is designed to endow older less powerful machines with a modern operating system.

A great example of repairing instead of replacing would be a mobile device that allows the market to move from changing old devices (throwing them away) to simply replacing their skins and parts. Did you know that 426.000 mobile phones retire from a really short life only in the USA?

Nokia’s Homegrown project

One of Nokia’s advanced design teams today called ‘Homegrown’ tries to change this with their Remade project. This is long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices. The team is exploring specific environmental and social issues including recycling, energy and how to make the benefits of mobile technology available to more people.

Remade’s father and Homegrown’s project leader Andrew Gartrell pushed design beyond just aesthetics. He considered covers, key mats, and displays but also engine, connectors, and other components. They discovered that a typical mobile phone contains around 44 of the 117 elements currently known to science. Andrew’s approach was to de-construct everything and rebuild it from scratch using recycled materials and sustainable technologies.

It’s made entirely from nothing new, using a cleaner engine, and made to last. They call it ‘Waste turned into a thing of beauty’.

Think outside the toxic box

Many companies promise green and toxic-free products. Greenpeace released a new list of electronic manufacturers and their green habits. Nokia, Apple and Sony Ericsson are in a so-called green zone. These companies scored best in terms of energy, avoiding poison and taking responsibility for their waste collection and processing equipment.

How green are electonics companies?

Apple excels in the elimination of toxins. All units of the company are already free from the harmful materials, PVC and brominated flame retardants. These toxins provide much pollution as the devices are discarded, especially in many developing countries where electronic waste is dumped.

HP produced a laptop that is substantially free of toxins and presented two new laptops and a desktop without PVC and brominated flame retardants.

These companies show that it is actually possible to create toxic-free products. It’s only a matter of thinking differently and investing in their design and production process.

Natural resources are scarce, use green energy

During a regular design project lots of e-mails and documents go from one to another. For years now I see e-mail footers with messages like ‘Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail’, I had one for a very long time. I like these footers, a simple reminder and not disturbing at all.

It’s not that we shouldn’t print our e-mails at all, sometimes it’s just handy to print them. You can easily change your printer setting to economy, which means 2-sided printing with two sheets on each side.

Designers should inform

We as designers (in my case of digital products) can play a role in informing our clients about their responsibilities. Not many clients think of energy usage of the hosting servers which their website uses.

There’s quite a lot of green hosting providers around that use green energy and use toxic free servers in their server parks. From my own experience I know that not many hosting companies are open about their energy usage. I consider they may actually have something to hide.

Placing high quality images on your web servers take an enormous amount of rack space. Keeping these racks running takes a lot of energy (and more racks as well). Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to downscale images a bit, (most of the times images are downscaled by the server when loading the web page which makes the high resolution file useless anyway).

Sources

Environmental Sustainability and Interaction – CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
Main photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr.com
The wasted years by Jill Ettinger
The story of stuff by Annie Leonard
Tomorrow now – Bruce Sterling, 2002
Ecomama
Webanalisten.nl for refreshing my memory on the Oxford oak story
Near Future Laboratory about Nokia Homegrown

We asked all visitors to formulate an opinion or a critique about the book before the meeting. Critiques about the book were diverse but almost all were positive. A lot of the readers thought they could very well use some of these infiltration tactics themselves or use them to advise their customers who have trouble justifying usability in their organizations.

In fact most of the tactics were used by the readers already. But there was never a book that formulated so many ways to win people for you in your quest to get usability into the minds of the people within an organization.

Bottom-up approach is not always enough

There was some discussion about how some of the readers had trouble reaching the right people inside an organization. To change a complete organization (or to speed up the process) you’ll need to get in touch with the CEO or his managers either directly or indirectly.

The book doesn’t provide any hands-on tips to get up to CEO level. One of the readers explained how he helped an e-commerce manager at one of his client’s companies by providing him with the right data all the time but kept failing to convince top-level management.

After a while he found out that it could very well not be the data that wasn’t correct but the way the message was sent. In chapter 39 John describes that you need to think like a leader to get the message across.

Passion and enthousiasm are most important

The group recommends every UX designer within the field who feels himself limited by a lack of support from inside their organization (or their client’s) to read this book. Almost every discussion we had during the evening came to the same conclusion. However, the only way to get any of these tactics to work is to have a passionate sender to communicate the message.

The framework distinguishes four types of people: competitive, spontaneous, humanistic and methodical. By solving design issues for all these types of website users we can be sure to cover a wide variety of perspectives while easily coming up with great sketches and ideas.

Imagine we’re challenging ourselves to design a solution for a person who has no idea which mp3 player to choose at an online store.

Competitive

According to MBTI this person would be the NT (iNtuitive/Thinking) type. These people prefer to decide quickly, their choice is mostly based on facts. If he would ask himself a question it would definately start with ‘what’.

Solution: A design solution for this type of person would be a lister page with short summaries (they don’t need more information to decide) and a quick buying button to get it over with.

Spontaneous

MBTI describes these persons as the SP (Sensing/Perceiving) type. They act quickly and their acts are based on feelings. If these people would ask themselves a question, it probably start with ‘why’.

Solution: A design solution for this person could be highlighting one product from the list as a special discount. This will definately appeal to them.

Humanistic

The MBTI would call this person an NF (iNtuitive/Feeling) type. These people follow their feelings and emotions, just like the spontaneous type. The humanistic type takes a lot more time to make a decision. In order to gain this person’s trust we need to do a little more effort. They’re very curious about what other people think of the product and about who sells it. If this person would ask himself a question it probably start with ‘who’.

Solution: An idea for the humanistic type could be a testimonial or a client quote. Also a reviews section would help this person decide.

Methodical

According the MBTI this is the SJ (Sensing/Judging) person, a slow decision maker who keeps looking for factual information. He wants to read and compare every detail before deciding which product he’ll choose. If he would ask himself a question it would probably start with ‘how’.

Solution: A solution for this type of person could be a comparison function. The comparison table would show all factual data of the product so our website visitor can take a comprehensive look before he decides. He probably wants to print all specs so he can take a look later on.

Brief history of MBTI

The base for this framework was originally invented by Carl Gustav Jung, he was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology.

In Jung’s book ‘Psychological types’ 1917 he describes four core types of human personality: thinking and feeling, perception and intuition. For each of the two sets, one type is dominant for every certain person. Besides these four types he distinguishes whether the person can be considered introvert or extravert.

Later Katharine Cook Briggs and here daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which classifies sixteen types of personalities. Their system is mostly used to describe team member’s role during a teambuilding proces. We stick to the main four personality types.

Sources

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator on Wikipedia
Sceencast: Does your site appeal to all buying modes?

All alarm bells ring when we read our country is losing her position on the international innovation ladder. In the year 2000 Holland used to be in fourth place, but these days we let Scandinavian countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark in front of us.

At Concept7 we thought it would be a great idea to discover their secret, so we decided to organise a ‘user innovation’ workshop in cooperation with the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies.

You can attend it, but there’s only 2 seats left so don’t miss out and contact us today.

Two innovation experts Niels Krøjgaard en Jacob Suhr Thomson will reveal their secrets in a one-day workshop on friday September 25th at our office in Paterswolde, The Netherlands (50km from the German border). They’ll discuss 19 practical and directly usable methods which can be used during your innovation process. These methods will learn you to see things from a user’s perspective and even let them involve directly. Their innovation methods have proven to run any innovation engine.

All the information you need: The ‘User Innovation’ workshop will be given by the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies on friday September 25th 2009 (9:00h until 16:00h) and hosted by Concept7 in Paterswolde.

Costs per person: € 599,00 (ex. vat).

Are you ready to get that innovation motor running within your organisation? Send an e-mail at stefan[at]concept7.nl or call Stefan Wobben at +316 463 40 998.

Additional information

During the last 10 years Niels Krøjgaard has worked in the advertisement industry as a project manager, producer of television commercials and as a creative idea and concept developer.

Niels has made several presentations and his courses are mostly about structured idea development. His participants’ creativity has always been kickstarted by his simple methods and tools. His courses mix theory and practice in a way that makes problem solving easy for anyone attending.

Jacob Suhr Thomsen works on a project for the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies. The project is about doing research in the construction sector and practices user-driven innovation. He regularly does presentations about Desuden futures studies, creativity, online cultures, user-driven innovation, and the knowledge society.

Gestalt laws

During my presentation I talked about the foundation of the gestalt theory and showed that gestalt psychology is about human perception. Researchers of this phenomenon discovered five principal laws that can be used in modern webdesign.

Proximity

Law of proximity, which says that objects placed near to one another are distinguished as a group.

Similarity

Law of similarity which explains that objects which have similar properties are grouped.

Closure

Law of closure says that objects which are alltogether surrounded by a border are seen as a group.

Continuity

Law of continuity shows objects placed in a certain row are seen as a group.

Simplicity

Law of simplicity shows that objects are always percieved in their simplest form.

My Colleague Stefan Wobben has written a great article (in Dutch) about this topic in Usabilityweb Magazine some time ago.