[IxDA Discuss] sustainable design

[Patrick G]

I've been following this thread with interest and finally had a spare  
moment to kick in my two cents. This thread parallels some thinking I  
have been doing about Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things and the potential  
of ubiquitous computing to enable sustainable production processes:

http://www.gneumatic.net/2006/05/01/review-of-bruce-sterlings-shaping- 
things/

Sterling writes that, "without sustainability, information is  
top-heavy, energy-hungry and heading for a crash; while sustainability  
is impractical without precise, comprehensive information about flows  
of energy and materials… [Ubicomp] have the capacity to change the  
human relationship to time and material processes by making those  
processes blatant and archiveable" (43).

What Sterling envisions (along with Greenfield, et. al.), is the point  
in the not-too-distant future when the price of passive RFID tags drops  
below five cents apiece and it suddenly becomes more economical to tag  
every manufactured object than not. Eventually, we could find ourselves  
in a position where the human-created physical environment is  
exhaustively represented by a stream of bits - the physical world as an  
'instantiation' of information.

The role of Design is twofold in a world where the map of information  
has overtaken the terrain of the real. First, it is up to Designers to  
create the systems that will manage all the possible relationships and  
transactions between the informational micro-histories generated by  
every object/box of objects/palate of boxes, every room, hallway,  
building, public space, etc. The second role of designers is to create  
the interfaces through which human beings will interact with this vast  
universe of data. A designer’s goal in this context would be to create  
a “transparent and accountable infrastructure” that would reveal how an  
object came into being. In such an information-saturated world, time  
and attention would be, as they have already become, the scarcest of  
resources. In the latter context, the design goal would be to minimize  
the impact of cognitive load and opportunity costs, enabling a user to  
interact with these objects without being crushed under the burden of  
micromanaging information.

Sterling argues that once we have this level of control over how we  
bring the physical world into being, the ability to do so in a  
sustainable fashion is within reach. It certainly seems that the  
instrumental capacity would exist. But I'm less certain that this is  
all that is needed. At the risk of oversimplification, this position  
seems to assume that we are all conscientious consumers, we just need  
more information about products in order to avoid the "bad" ones.  
Certainly there are people who do fall into this category. But, as Fred  
and Nathan mentioned in their posts, we must not only convince  
ourselves to be more conscientious, we must convince others as well.  
IMO, sustainability is an inherently political project, so the issue of  
influencing behavior is paramount, regardless of how much technical  
mastery we obtain over the physical world.


------------------------------
Patrick Grizzard
265 Union Street
Apt. 3C
Brooklyn, NY 11231
m: 646.522.9667