Category: design

Categories
business design engineering systems

Strategic sustainable development

Goran Broman

You would be very unlikely to win a game of chess without knowing the principled definition of checkmate. Reaching a sustainable society without any idea of the principles that define that situation would also be very unlikely.

Goran Broman [ 1:10:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Prof Göran Broman heads the Department of Strategic Sustainable Development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden.

This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.

Talking points

Developing tools to support strategic sustainable thinking

It is important that we develop tools with the community, the type of people who will be using them or they will be useless.

How organisations can support the whole of society towards sustainability, and how can they do that in a way that strengthens their own organisation – that is the being strategic.

If an organisation does something for sustainability of society, that is good, but if the company goes bankrupt doing that then it’s not that good because they can’t continue to contribute, and they become a bad example…then other companies will be hesitant to work proactively with sustainability and that will slow down the progress of society towards sustainability.

It is really important that organisations that work towards sustainability are successful in the short term, because that will help the transition.

Strategic sustainability is about developing methodologies to help organisations bring together those seemingly hard to match aspects – the short term with the long term, the small scale perspective with the big perspective, the self interest profitability with ethics, and so on.

A framework for strategic sustainability, tools supporting the whole of society in a way that strengthens your own organisation.

Having a long term perspective, a vision of where you want to far into the future when the whole of society is sustainable, how is your organisation supporting that, fulfilling the needs or the wants of the customers within the frame of a sustainable society in the future. From that, look back to today’s situation, how does that differ? What are you doing today that contributes to unsustainability?

Once the companies have created that vision, we put that vision inside the frame of the definition of sustainability – because is is really stupid to have a vision that cannot exist in the future.

In what way is the company today contributing to sustainability and unsustainability.

It is possible to avoid the apparent contribution of short term profitability and long term societal sustainability.

It is difficult to describe a product, a person, a company today is sustainable since the whole of society is unsustainable, or on an unsustainable track, whatever you do contributes to that unsustainability. But you can say that a product can be designed, or a company can be run in a way that contributes to sustainability – contributes to the transition from today’s unsustainable situation to the sustainable situation, that you can say.

Only when we have reached the situation when the whole of society is sustainable, and everything within it…then you can say a company or product is sustainable, but today you can not. We are unfortunately very far from that situation.

It’s impossible, or at least very hard, and not very wise, to define in detail what a sustainable society should look like. We won’t get everyone to agree on detail…another reason is that so many things will change during the transition that we cannot predict… So we have been trying to find a principled definition of sustainability.

The principled definition of strategic sustainability can be described using a chess metaphor. In chess you also have a principled definition of the goal, how do you define success – you put your opponent in checkmate. Checkmate is not defined in a detailed way…it is a principled definition – it says that the king must be threatened, the king must not be able to move away from the threat, you should not be able to put a piece in front of the king to protect him and you should not be able to strike out the threat. If those principles are fulfilled then it’s checkmate. It can look in an almost infinite number of ways…when you start to play a game of chess you don’t know exactly how it will end. That definition is used all the time by the chess player…first you learn the basic rules and how to play the game (the A step)…then he or she assesses the current situation, where are my pieces, my opponents pieces and so on (the B step), then work up a number of ways you can move ahead (the C step) and there are huge amount of possibilities, and the (D step) what smart early moves should I start with? And you assess those moves through the lens of the definition of checkmate because that’s what you want to reach. Once you’ve made a couple of moves you reassess the situation, because the opponent has moved his or her pieces in a way you could not predict in detail. You move and reassess. All the time the player has the definition of checkmate.

You would be very unlikely to win a game of chess without knowing the principled definition of checkmate. Reaching a sustainable society without any idea of the principles that define that situation would also be very unlikely.

We are defining and continually refining strategic sustainability principles that correspond to checkmate.

Our principles are based on defining an ecological and socially sustainable society…people ask why not economics? …but that is not included in the goal, because economics is not the goal – it is means for reaching the goal.

We have a systematic increase of fossil carbon, captured in carbon dioxide, that is increasing. That cannot continue, we cannot have higher and higher concentrations all the time, because eventually we will reach a tipping point, or critical limit where the system will collapse. We don’t know exactly where that limit is, but we don’t need to know exactly.

If we run the society the way that we will have as an unavoidable outcome a systematic increase of substances, then it is unsustainable. We don’t have to know exactly when it collapses, but it will, and the design as such is unsustainable.

Of course it is of value to try to find out the critical limits of substances, but it is also hard, so we should not put all of our efforts in society, in research to find where exactly where those critical limits are, it’s hard and we’ll never succeed…when we know that if society is designed in such a way that will result in us approaching those limits, it’s unsustainable.

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to increases in systematic degradation by physical means – mismanagement of land, capacity of ecosystem….

We are currently working on elaborating the social dimension.

(chess metaphor, not overlord) importance of self benefit of companies…society is on a non-sustainable route…it is becoming more and more difficult for companies to do things that continue to contribute to unsustainability.

We need to change the system we have from within, we have no other option. People that have realised where we need to be on a principled level need to strike that balance, by moving ahead as fast as fast as possible, not faster or slower. This being strategic and is not easy. It’s not easy to play chess just because you know the definition of checkmate.

(But do we know the know the rules of sustainability?) We know some rules, we know the scientific laws for example, they apply regardless of politics. Then there are rules that might change – politically decided laws and regulations might change during the process. So we have a mix of rules.

(can we see the whole board? some things are unseeable, there are things we don’t understand and won’t understand) We can see the whole board depending on resolution, in a very concrete term the first astronauts saw the earth from outside. Then at a more refined level of resolution, a single organisation might not see it everyday, but they can relate to that full picture.

All the things I have done in sustainability come from childhood. When I was kid, my parents were engaged in sustainability. Especially my father, he was chairman of a local environmental association.

I chose…engineering so I could design a problem out of a system.

We see sustainability as a design problem. Society is designed in a way that is not sustainable, and operated on a basic level that is not sustainable.

I decided to go for engineering as my formal education…I thought it would be easier to change the system if I had that credibility.

(Activist?) Yes. I act to create change.

(Challenges) Huge challenge in academia of compartmentalisation. People doing research and people doing academic education are divided into disciplines – which is not bad in itself and we need more and more detailed knowledge in specific fields – but not if we do that instead, or only. If we don’t have some people doing a structured overview. How can you bring together all that wonderful knowledge?

How can you combine all that knowledge in the best way relation to the sustainability challenge that we have? That is, by nature, interdisciplinary academic research. That is problematic, because when academic groups are evaluated, they are evaluated from the disciplinary point of view. It is hard for interdisciplinary groups to get fair evaluations.

(Miracle) One of the first things would be to have every person in the world be knowledgeable about how to reach strategic sustainability.

We have the physical resources, we have energy coming from the sun that would be sufficient to keep all of humanity in very good living standards, if we do it in the right way we have enough food, and so on…so it’s about managing this in a sustainable way, and that takes knowledge and competence.

(Advice) Try learn about those things and try to do what you can. Many people think “this is so daunting, so huge, so what I do as a little person is meaningless if I do something the system is so big and unsustainable it will collapse anyhow” but it’s not, try to do what you can. If every person does what he or she can, then we are a good part of the way.

Don’t be scared off, do what you can do. If every person does what he or she can do, then we will move our position forward, and then it will be apparent to those people that we can change things.

Categories
computing design economics

Change through informal exchange

John Harvey

Informal exchange is binding, it creates ties, it creates social obligation.

John Harvey [ 45:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

John Harvey is a researcher at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. An economic anthropologist, John is researching systems to encourage non-monetary forms of exchange such as freecycle, couch surfing and his own Neehoy. He talks with us here about prosociality and empathy as core design strategies.

Talking points

As much time, effort and inter-personal meaning goes into the informal economy

There are two fundamentally different ways people come at understanding the economy. There’s the formalist approach – the idea that we’re all rational people, and that we rationalise, economise in the presence of scarce resources, and the opposite side to that – the substantivist approach would argue that neither of those presuppositions are true the idea of rationality is not universal and the idea of scarcity is not universal – they are constructs. The formalists might say the economy is the aggregate of all individual actions, whereas the substantives may say the economy is simply the way that people provision and furnish for themselves – they not might be trying to maximise utility.

There’s always been this sense of alienation when it comes to exchange. You might consider some people you talk to the same as yourself – you might give or share with them readily, or some people you might consider as other – you might want some balanced exchange.

Alienation refers to the objects in our lives – the idea that some objects are transferable, and some objects are not transferable – we keep them within our kin, our friends, our family. Some items assume a collective ownership – the food in the fridge. That comes from a shared mutual understanding of who we are. Introducing otherness introduces the notion of debt.

New technology is changing the way we look at things – we can belong to multiple communities online that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with otherwise…this is changes the dynamics of how we procure things for our own lives.

(Couch-surfing, wikipedia, creative commons) These new forms of collective ownership are fascinating.

We should be designing economic policy that helps people to feel well-being rather than increased GDP.

I think GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity

The free market…has helped to liberate people, but potentially it imprisons them in an iron cage of consumption.

Efficiency is a good thing…the less damage we can do to the planet, the less resources we can extract the better. Efficiency as it relates to production starts to become controversial – as you put efficient tools into the hands of a few, you reduce the workforce.

Centralising production…full of conundrums…

We’re (Neehoy) expanding the ideas of free-cycle to large scale asset management.

Most of the focus in asset management has been on high value assets, but this overlooks the millions of pounds tied up in furniture. In health, much of this is dormant, sat idle, if we can reduce this by a fraction then not only is the organisation saving money, it’s also a great thing for the environment.

Prosociality means to me a voluntary intentional behaviour that results in benefits for another.

In rational economics this is explained by the utilitarian self – if you act in a way that is kind to other people, you have a warm glow – you feel good about yourself – you’ll feel good and that’s why you do it it’s selfish. Similarly they’ll say when you see somebody in distress you’ll feel negative, you’ll feel guilt. Acting kindly is helping to relieve that sense of guilt. Alternatively to that utilitarian concept of altruism, that egoistic interpretation, are ideas about empathic concern – the ability to imagine the other. What other people endure and perceive in their own lives.

We see these rational behavioural economic assumptions in design. Recently we’ve seen a lot of work that attempts to nudge behaviour, it takes an individual to be at best to be rational and at worst to be irrational but within confines – bounded rationality. …HCI is well positioned to present information, cues to try to manipulate behaviour, but it is fraught.

Activist: HCI an interventionary field, we don’t just describe the world, we try to change it – it is inescapably an activist discipline. There is a moral obligation of HCI researchers to consider impacts.

I’m naturally anarchistic – I like decentralisation, I like giving tools to people so that they can do something meaningful with their life. Unless those tools are created in participation with local cultures you run the risk of cultural imperialism.

I like the idea that technology can help people to become kinder, freer.

I celebrating differences rather than looking for universal principles.

Streetbank: a small charity, encouraging people to act more kinder to other people that doesn’t rely on reciprocity – I think that is a beautiful thought.

Pay-it-forward still has notion of money that involves debt, the moral stance of obligation, I like play, play-it-forward. Could you create an economic based on these Utopian principles? Not likely to happen but a nice thought.

We need both sides of the economy, there needs to a redress of the balance between those two sides.

Advice: Be willing to fail. Don’t take failure as end of the road – there’s so much to learn from failure it is almost virtuous.

Categories
computing design

Redesigning design

Ron Wakkary

Design is about improving the world, that’s kind of why you do it. It’s an optimistic craft – you really do believe that you can make the world better. The position you have determines your view on what better is – not who happens to be paying you.

Ron Wakkary [ 55:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Ron Wakkary is Professor in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, he is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Interactions and Director, Interaction Design Research Centre.

Talking points

I was a painter…I was interested in collaboration, I became interested in computing for colloborations with other artists, and conceptual art – performances.

Then I began a small digital design firm

The practices became blurred because digital media blurred the lines – you didn’t have to say if it was a painting, photo or performance. But digital collaboration was key.

I did my PhD so research could be a platform for my art.

I just marvelled that you could ask questions, critical questions, really interesting engaging questions, and find people who could be also interested in these questions…and find the funding to explore them.

Research and teaching all blends together for me, it’s all really a platform for enquiry.

Making and how we make things is really fundamental to how we construct our lives. Sustainability is an example of that….I’m really interested in how people address sustainability through making things.

This goes to the core of what I’m interested in – understanding design and interaction design, how people make things of all practices to affect the lives they lead and that affects sustainability.

Making things is a code for practices. Everyday design – everyone is a designer.

Such as how a family uses multiple resources to create family memories (heights marked on doorframes, photos on fridge etc).

Everyday design practices as sustainable practices… in the sense that people had enduring and resourceful relationships with artifacts.

A resource could be changed and reshaped, it was a resourcefulness that is creative but also sustainable. In contrast to that is how we design technologies, it really negates that. It doesn’t allow us to have enduring relationships with our artifacts. It doesn’t allow us to manipulate them, to change them, it doesn’t allow us to combine them with other simple artifacts. Aside from the obvious (everyday design)…of extending the life of something, it allows people to have much more control over their environment.

Sustainability is such a big issue, but we can see it played out in the home, when we want something we don’t make, we just buy things. Our creative transactions are shopping. And designers are complicit in that.

A user interface is a promise of what functionality or what the potential of this can be, and we tend to want to create this multi-functionality – more and more promise – and those promises, more than not, become broken. But there’s another promise underneath that, that if we didn’t get it right this time, we’ll get it right next time. And this is the desirable thing. Design plays a role in the desire part, in that it creates the promise, breaks the promise, then has permission to got at it again. But this is a problem, in everyday design people don’t look to something for its promise, they look to it for its creative potential.

People could do that with simple things and simple systems…people look for the creative potential, how they readily reuse it, remake it, to be the active agent…this is different from going to buy something based on a promise, then the transaction is all about the purchase and using it to the promise – that’s a very different relationship.

Steampunk is a design fiction – it allows an exploration of a different set of values, a cultural critique, all based on a practice of making. What can professional design learn from that?

In Green DIY, it’s not enough just to be individually sustainable, but to promote sustainability and ways to be sustainable – learning and sharing and being social.

There are countless examples of professional designers getting it wrong an a practice, say going into a community garden and saying ‘if you put sensors and you had this large public display in your community garden, and we did this modelling…’, that doesn’t embed itself into the practice of community gardening.

For me the key is to understand practices, and to be reflexive, and that might mean changing practices.

There’s a set of assumptions we use to get through the day, through our professional lives. There’s a set of assumptions around the power and utility of technology. That’s been incredibly useful, but needs a critical reflection.

We have to find the point where automation is balanced by human agency and interaction. Easy to say…but a very hard balance to find. We don’t really know how to find that balance – so we need to continually reflect on our own practices.

We need to understand people’s existing values, manifest in the things already around them, and try to extend them.

(Would you work for a cigarette company?) No. (Do your students know that?) Yes. Important question.

As a designer you have to have a position. Doing “objective research”, natural science research, is not a particularly effective way of doing design research, you can’t take the researcher out of the research, you can’t take the designer out of the design. You’re simply not a medium to take on the request of your client, you have a position. When you have to make a decision, the only things that are going to help are your experience and your position, and hopefully those two go together.

Removing the designer from the design is really problematic. Inserting the “cool designer, they know aesthetics”, that’s just one aspect, that is also problematic. A good design has coherency and has purpose. It makes an argument and executes it.

A position is not fixed, it can be dynamic.

It has helped me to accept that there are so many ways of doing practice, so each of us should consider how does sustainability affect your practice? And treat that reflexively, and be prepared to change. You can change the means and achieve the same ends.

The desire to be a designer, it is a detailed craft. You have to have a level of commitment and desire. We haven’t created the curriculum to enable it.

We worked with the city of Vancouver in a City Studio, using the city project on their ambitious Greenest City 2020 Action Plan.

We used speculative design strategies: ludic design, critical design, design fiction, value sensitive design – those methods all require the designer to take a position.

Organisations…need to constantly rethink what kind of social grouping they are – what they believe in.

This generation of students, at least the ones I work with, have…a level of everyday activism, there is for many a kind of different calculus that they go through in terms of finding the place that they want to work, who they want to collaborate with, and the communities that they want to be in. That’s not true of everybody, but it doesn’t have to be true of everybody, you need 20% of the people to be like that, and I think there’s way more than 20% of graduates who are doing that.

It’s getting harder to guide students because the kinds of things they are looking for are all over the place…
start-ups, large companies not for profits, social enterprise, so the level of networking that we (academics) have to do do is much more complicated and more involved – it’s great if you can bring it all back into your teaching and research, that works as a really nice virtuous cycle.

There is a need to rethink.

Maybe I’ve naive, but I’m optimistic, and that partly because of what I see in my students.

Sustainability won’t go away. This cuts both ways “are you still talking about that?” and “if we don’t solve it are we really going to fall apart?”. But there’s a persistence there – you can’t get away from it.

The values… I see starting to rise to the top are these really compelling hard things to deal with, so complex, that it’s not always about coming up with a single solution.

Maybe I’m so process oriented, but my practice view…when people have figured out a method that always comes up with an answer, the relevance of the answer is less and less relevant. We have the perfect, air tight totally irrelevant solutions. There’s been a leaning of the ship to the more complex “I’m not going to get an easy answer”.

Experimental method doesn’t lend itself to wicked problems. We’re seeing much more divergence.

(on enjoying his career) There’s enough stuff to inquire about, there are enough problems to keep you motivated, there’s enough good people to around to keep you motivated, there are enough surprises to let you know you don’t have the answers and you have to keep searching, and enough dynamism and change to be optimistic.

Students keep you on your toes more than you keep them on their toes.

(Activist). I’m concerned, I want to find ways I feel like I can contribute.

(Challenges) Increasing complexity and dynamics – finding people who want to work on understanding that.

(Advice) Keep going. Keep making. Chances are, whatever you are doing is not as good as you think, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous or harmful as you think it is. The worst thing is not to do anything – we can rationalise inaction. No-one has the monopoly on what the answer is so it is going to require a lot of divergence and a lot of multiplicity of viewpoints so everyone should be active.

Ron Wakkary

Categories
design food

Food as experience

Emilie Baltz

Food is our most fundamental form of consumption

Emilie Baltz [ 49:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Emilie Baltz is a food designer and artist who has produced Junk Foodie and L.O.V.E. Handbook. She was in Dunedin to keynote at Food Design.

Talking points

Food is a personal material for me…it represents identity, community and culture

Slowness means locality, but also greater awareness

Food is an experimental and experiential material

(Traces) Cultural codes – we have tables, we use utensils…getting rid of all the distance and bringing ourselves back to a place of primitive being, in a sustainability mindset we’re reminding ourselves of the place we exist as humans, that brings us to our primitive level within a civilised state

As food becomes more sanitised, we get further and further away from actual ingredients

Eating, over consumption, we need to look as a part of a whole ecosystem

We’ve created a host of products that depend on systems and those systems and those systems have been very badly constructed.

As designers -and design is about the discipline of order – we’re having to reorder and reframe and redesign those systems for better consequences

Food is at heart one of the issues of over-consumption, so how do we begin to look at that as human behaviour and reorganise it and reframe it?

America…is one of those spaces where there is a great deal of over consumption and inequality of consumption.

The pioneer mindset of eating as much as you can is still in place. Greater conversations and awareness are the beginning.

Working in food brings the opportunity for the conversation to be playful, joyful, not just finger wagging. I don’t believe people change when we wag our fingers at each other. But we do begin to change when we’re in a positive mindset and when we move forward in a positive space and the food and the dining experience helps do that.

This isn’t a regime that says “do this, three times, five times a day in massive quantities”, no, it says “re-imagine the things in front of you, use your imagination, use your creativity to transform the everyday into something else”.

Food is our most fundamental form of consumption

Food is an experience, and it is a highly designed experience

Food is a prop for a narrative, and human behaviour is a certain type of narrative throughout the world…so if we look at our food traditions and food rituals…these affect our most fundamental form of consumption – how we behave and how we consume.

The world problems that are at hand today are magnificent, large and beyond immediate repair…the only thing we can do as individuals is educate ourselves and to go forward with greater positive intent and with greater clarity as to how we want to take action in the world.

I think that there is room and there is necessity for healthy ecosystems, so that means there is space and a demand for luxury, there is space and a demand for joy and delight, there is space and a demand for critical thought and analysis, there is space and demand for better policy making, better justice, but if we can bring all of those systems together and understand where we are powerful and where our voice lies as individual creators I think that’s the greatest form of sustainability.

There’s no solitary linear path to a solution, what there is is a greater ability to speak to each other, greater awareness of the different ways and different flows and different systems and their applications to certain environments – and that’s what begins to create true ecosystems and true methods of sustainability.

From material understanding students can begin to design forays into larger issues at hand – like food justice, looking at food systems, how can we take our understanding of this material and then use it as a new means of communication, and potentially as a new means of being able to reorganise some of these systems that are quite broken.

I don’t think that caring enough to do something is an issue anymore…there’s an understanding that we have a huge amount of things to fix. Designers are specifically focussed on problem solving and end users.

Exploring these great issues through the lens of food is…creating greater empathy and greater joy. It is a material that allows you to make right away…to make, to prototype, to test, to learn and to redo. And that’s goal that everybody wants to get to – to take action in the world – to help something.

Design students come in with empathy…they enter into creativity because they want to help something…if as educators we’re able to help focus them more on problems – real problems – they’re very willing to take that path.

I create different lenses onto the world, to show that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of looking at the material that we consume everyday. I would frame this as participation rather than activism.

Challenges not in projects, more in what choices to make next and what those choices mean for how I want to participate in the world. Until now I’ve had the great privilege to be able to make an incredibly diverse body of work, and great privilege in being able to play in that space and I recognise that fully…moving forward, I have a huge amount of learning, great connections and a wonderful network – how do I want to use that? that is my challenge

Advice: Say yes. Don’t let fear make your decisions for you. Moving forward with a positive mindset that embraces, that says “yes and…” and that allows you to participate in whatever way you can…to participate positively.

Works discussed

Energia
Traces
X-species Adventure Club
Food Design Studio at Pratt Institute
Porcelain Dust Mask Bowl
Junk Foodie
L.O.V.E. Handbook

Categories
computing design

Usability:Sustainability

Don Norman

To respect the others’ point of view and try to understand it. This applies whether it’s warring nations, difficult negotiations in business or designing something for other people to use.

Don Norman on SustainableLens [ 39:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

You know when a door has a label that says push (or pull) when it should just be obvious? That bad design is referred to as a “Norman door”. Don Norman is usabilty. And it turns out he is sustainability too.

Dr Donald Norman has for many years advocated user centred design. His 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things has been top of the reading list for both design and computing students for nearly three decades. Several other books include Living with Complexity, Emotional Design and The Invisible Computer. The question for this conversation, is how can we apply the learnings from Norman’s work to the design of systems for sustainability?

Talking points

A physical affordance is not what matters, what matters what it says to who is looking at it.

Great design is communication, which has its own form and its own function

Because its invisible we don’t have to think about it

How could we make people more aware of the source of their electricity? It’s not an easy problem, but its one we should be much more concerned about.
And how do we do that without getting in the way? It would be good to get a little bit in the way because we would like people to use these things less, some habits need changing.

It’s hard, really hard to change behaviour.

We are wasting most of the stuff, wasting things that is not doing nobody any good.

One thing that bothers me about the sustainability movement is that people look for easy answers. In the design world, its a standard thing that people ask your design class to come up with things that will save energy, so they come up with simple answers – we’ll use wood instead of some manufactured stuff, and we’ll have a meter that shows you how much hot water you’re using when you take a shower – and it’s all rather silly in my opinion. I want to work where I have the biggest impact, but the amount of water we waste in the household is trivial…in the US most of the water is used in industry and agriculture and evaporates before it reaches its target.

I want to do things that have the maximum impact, it makes people feel good to make sure you turn the lights off when you leave the room – and that’s good and I don’t want to say we shouldn’t – but when you look at the total amount of energy in the country, that’s just a small percentage.

Wicked problems, by definition – they’re wicked. Its often hard to define the problem, it’s hard to know when you’re getting an answer. But most of these (sustainability) problems are like that.

You’re not going to find a single thing to solve a wicked problem – it has to be a concerted effort.

We have to change the whole nature of business so they realise that they have an obligation. Business has an obligation to society, to where it lives. We once chose to believe that, but modern business schools have taught the importance of profit, and quarterly profit and benefit to the stockholders – but I’m more concerned about benefit to the world, to humanity. We have to figure out how they can do that in a responsible way.

(on systems and complex problems) We have to start thinking big. Question, step back and ask the biggest problem.

The scale has meant technology has had implications we couldn’t predict.

I decided I didn’t want the military money, and I stopped taking it. So yes, there are many things I would not do. I will not worth with cigarettes, I will not work with weapons.

These things we consider evil and the things we consider non-evil, the problem is there’s very seldom a sharp line between the two…as the example of lethal weapons highlights…students ought to grapple with that and think about it.

We owe it to students to cause them to think these issues through. That doesn’t mean we should tell them what they should think. But we should teach them how to think, how to examine the different sides, and how to determine what their response is.

One thing that annoys me is what we call human error. 95% or so of accidents are blamed on human error, on people. Nonsense. If it were 5% I would believe it, but when it’s 95% it means you’re not designing things that are appropriate for people.

We need to think of accidents as a rope of many strands, it’s the last strand that breaks that gets the blame, and usually that’s the person with their hands on the rope.

(can we think about extinctions and climate change as human error) That’s why the systems approach is so necessary for accidents and especially for sustainability. We look at the last thread that breaks – and say ‘I can reduce the amount of water you take while taking a shower’, or wood instead of metal or whatever – and that’s the easy answer and it might not be at all relevant, you have to ask, what does the system look like?

The technologist’s solution is technology – we’ll make cars that can drive themselves. But is technology the solution to all our ailments? No, and sometimes technology is the cause of those ailments, so it will take a mix.

I’m an activist, just not a jumping up and down activist. I certainly believe in the principles of sustainability, and I’m trying slowly to cause these changes to come about.

Challenges. When I look around the world it’s frightening. Global warming – look at how difficult it has been to convince people that it’s a real phenomenon and maybe do something about it if we start now. Peace for that matter – look at all the warring factions in different parts of the world.

(what can we take from his writings, Design of Everyday Things and so on, to apply to these bigger sustainability problems?) Empathy, to understand the other point of view. You have to design for other people, the consideration of other people, and other people are not stupid. If you have two groups fighting and disagreeing, quite often each of them are correct, but it’s from their own narrow point of view. You can’t come to some sort of agreement unless you understand the other person’s point of view…doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, but it does mean you have to understand why they are so vehement. And that’s the only way to come to a resolution. To respect the others’ point of view and try to understand it. This applies whether its warring nations, difficult negotiations in business or designing something for other people to use.

Whenever we do things, we should try to understand the other people, take into account not how people ought to behave – it’s so simple to give a lecture ‘this is what you should do’ – no, go and observe them, talk with them and understand them.

Take a systems point of view, don’t look at one simple thing, but look at all the interacting parts, life is complex and that means our solutions will be complex ones.

Categories
computing design psychology

Designing for people

Some technologists want to create a seamless future…I ‘m not one of those, I think it’s useful that parts are nubby – some parts leave room for error or space for adjustment, some room for learning behaviour.

Han Pham with Samuel Mann [ 1:04:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Han Pham is Future Cities Experience Strategist, at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities.

HanPham

Talking points:

If you only ask users about your product, they’ll only tell you about your product – we need to be able to step away from the screen.

Before we bring in our life-changing solution, we have to realise that people survive without it – this can be uplifting and challenging together.

We’re designing for how people behave, at an individual level but also considering what does this mean at the community level?

Sometimes you want to make it invisible, sometimes you want to see detail

Sometimes you ask people about the future, and they think about the future as inevitable and they think about it as this glossy surface thing that’s going to come their way whether they like it or not, and it’s not very porous – there’s not a lot of transparency. People are frightened by this – there’s a sense of helplessness.

We are not just designing things, we’re designing how people learn. If we can create frameworks for how they understand something – with frameworks that are sticky and that work for them – builds an expectation of how things should work. We can make use of that learning window so products and services can change how people think.

Users don’t necessarily want to carry an identity card that says ‘I’m a sustainable person’…they are them

Incremental changes can be a sea-change.

Sometimes a sea-change is finding a pattern of behaviour that not only the lead adopters are going to adopt

(are you an activist) Yes, I say to technology companies, people have a place.

Categories
architecture design

Architectural games: designing complex emergent systems

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Ann Pendleton-Jullian [ 58:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It is not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. She brings to sustainability her experience in architecture – but it’s not all about buildings. She says it is “not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?”.  In her studio she goes “beyond a complex juggling act of all the conditions” to adopt a ludic design process.

games by nature…are the way by which we push boundaries of the conditions that reality gives us, and in pushing boundaries – identity boundaries, physical boundaries – we test out alternative possibilities and they are very constructive for moving society forward.

it’s trickery, they’re designing complex adaptive systems without knowing they’re doing it at first

The four themes she consistently publishes on are:

  • emergent forms of architecture and urbanism
  • game design as a way to tool the mind to work with and design complex emergent systems
  • design and education innovation
  • architectural analysis and theory about anything that has to do with the intersection of culture, technology and the natural and built environment within a global ecology.

    • Until we have shifted from a narrative of guilt and fear to a narrative of desire it’s going to be a real hard thing to win

Ann Pendleton-Jullian was in New Zealand to give a keynote speech at HERDSA13.  The title of her talk was Upside Down and Inside Out. The Future of the University as a Design Problem.

Some of the works referenced in our conversation:

 

Categories
design

Smart Cornwall

David Hawkins [ 55:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr David Hawkins is Associate Dean (research & innovation), School of Art and Design at University College Falmouth. David talks to Sustainable Lens about the Smart Cornwall initiative.

Categories
design policy

Science meet policy. Policy meet science.

Dr Maggie Lawton [ 56:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Life at the intersection of science and policy.

During her career in management and governance, Dr Maggie Lawton has help lead New Zealand’s organisations down the road of a sustainable future. She describes her work as “Strategic Sustainable Design”. Not considering herself an activist but as a change agent, Maggie sees her role as “staying inside the room” – helping guide policy and decisions. Amongst other roles, Maggie now leads Otago Polytechnics Centre for Research Expertise in Sustainable Practice.

Shane’s number of the week: 9. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been since 2001. 2012 is on track to being the ninth hottest year on record.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: This week a new report into consumer attitudes was released. The Regeneration Consumer Study is an in-depth online survey of consumer attitudes, motivations and behaviours relating to sustainable consumption among 6,224 respondents across six major international markets.

Categories
computing design

Joined-up thinking

Six Silberman [ 1:00:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Six Silberman. Wow. This is an insight packed interview.

Currently based in New York, Six works at the intersection of art, economics, design, computing, business, sociology (this list goes on). He has come around to describing himself as a systems analyst. This extended interview traverses full cost accounting for the life cycle, our fetish for growth, the search for frameworks for thinking bigger, power relationships, working collaboratively, creating space for reflection, the role of business in society, and the probability that we are at the start of an n-dip recession as parts of a collapse (he is a co-author on an award winning paper Collapse Informatics).

Six asks how we get back to a place where we recognise the importance of managing things we fundamentally cannot measure? We discuss the importance of systems thinking and ponder whether sustainability can be considered an emergent phenomena. Finally Six tells us his plans for connecting large scale discussions of sustainability to things we can actually do.

Categories
computing design

Stefan Kreitmayer

Stefan Kreitmayer [ 46:08 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Stefan Kreitmayer is from both the Open University’s Centre for Research in Computing and University College London’s Interaction Centre. Stefan has a varied background developing interactive and reactive computer graphics for live performances and installations in collaboration with composers, directors, designers, and choreographers. Earlier activities included film music and sound design. Stefan tells us how this background led to the development of the 4decades simulation game. 4Decades is a game developed to enable large groups to explore and critique scientific models of global climate economics. It is based on a real-time dynamic simulation that teams interact with via distributed tablets and public displays.

Categories
design education politics

Nicola Bould

Nicola Bould on Sustainable Lens: Resilience on Radio [ 58:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Nicola Bould describes both design and sustainability as verbs – as processes. Design, she says is about finding creative ways to solve complex problems. Thinking bigger and wider she says is key to work at the start of the pipe – thinking in strategically and in systems – not to try to retrofit sustainability onto products at the end of the pipe. Sustainability must move beyond “can’ts” and scaring people, to looking for positives – doing the things we love in different ways. Key to this is building, and rebuilding our communities.

Nicola has just finished her PhD, and has just taken a new job as an Issues Assistant working for the Greens, based in Auckland.

Shane’s number of the week: 1.8. 1.8 billion pounds is the estimated cost to the UK of replicating the ecosystem service provided by bees (Friends of the Earth campaign).

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam is off to CHI again this year where he hopes to focus on people working in areas beyond single resource consumption. He is involved in running a workshop that explores the seeming mismatch of using technology to promote more simple ways of living.

Trainspotting: Someone’s notes during during Shane’s number of the week may not have been comprehensive. They might have just said 1.8 billion. No matter, I’ll just look it up:

1.8 billion people are between the age of 10 and 24 (PSI.org)
1.8 billion people live on less than $1 a day, 70 percent of them are women (TIAW)
1.8 billion people are in informal work, and 700 million of those are in extreme poverty (formal work is 1.2 billion, OECD stats).
1.8 billion people still drinking unsafe water, UNICEF and WHO
1.8 billion young people will not reach their economic potential due to poor education, infrastructure and jobs (UN Population Fund UNFPA).
1.8 billion muslims in the world.
1.8 billion international tourists expected in 2030 (up from 1B in 2012, UNWTO)
1.8 billion US dollars worth of good shoplifted in a month in US (liveleak.com)
1.8 billion tonnes of CO2 released in Amazonian drought in 2009-10 (ERL via treehugger)
1.8 billion speakers of English (about 380 million native, wikipedia – good luck finding a valid source).
1.8 billion NOK (300M US$) being spent per year by Norway to find sustainable ways of powering the developing world

Categories
design

Dr Mick Abbott

Mick Abbott on Sustainable Lens: Resilience on Radio [ 59:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Instead of limiting the numbers of people who have access to the wilderness could we have a goal to maximise the impact – the more people the better it is?

Editor of a new book Wild Heart: The possibility of wilderness in New Zealand, Dr Mick Abbott has strong views about the wilderness. For starters, let’s lose the idea that there is such a place. Rather than defined by geography, for Mick, wilderness is any place where we can have respectful relationships with indigenous ecosystems. Thus the wilderness is a way of understanding – of generativity and richness – rather than a specific place.

From bungy jumping to brushing teeth in Antarctica, this is our widest ranging interview yet.

Shane’s number of the week: 32. That’s 32 Celsius which was the temperature in Chicago in mid March.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Are the Millennium Goals aspirational targets, achievable, or low hanging fruit?

Trainspotting: Extra points for answers to these ten burning questions:

  1. How does the experience of a bungy jump take months?
  2. Why should we stop treating our land as if we were all motelliers?
  3. Is design an indulgence?
  4. What can we learn from Antarctica?
  5. How did he come to the realisation that the more stuff I carry with me, the less I ask of the place
  6. Why does he support a tunnel, but not a monorail?
  7. Where is water explicitly energy?
  8. How is 100% Pure an opportunity for us?
  9. Why do we take photos of places and ignore the real story behind the camera?
  10. How many months are there until the end of the Century?
Categories
design education

Prof Samuel Mann

Samuel Mann [ 59:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our own Dr Samuel Mann from Otago Polytechnic sat in the guest chair this week. We talked about his new book “Sustainable Lens: a visual guide“. We trace the development of sustainability through its representation in diagrams. The book presents a model for seeing the world through a sustainability-driven perspective.

Shane’s number of the week: 20 000,000,000,000. 20 trillion is the amount of money that would have to be written off the value of the oil companies worldwide if we moved to a sustainable future – which is why companies and governments are so unwilling to move in that direction…

Categories
design

Brian Burns

Brian Burns [ 57:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Brian Burns asks “if we were to ride into ‘Ecoville’ late one night – how would we recognise it, and would he like to live there?”.   Brian describes his experiences when he set his University of  Carleton Industrial Design students off to explore Ecoville.

Shane’s number of the week: 3,000,000,000    The contribution to US agriculture from insect eating bats is estimated at US$3billion (less conservative estimates range up to $54B).      US biologist Tom Kunz and his team calculated this from a study of savings in pesticide costs in 8 counties in Texas ($74 per acre) then extrapolated to the US at large, adjusting for bat populations and local levels of agricultural productivity to produce a nationwide bat .   With bats threatened by careless wind-turbine development in major flyways and, more pressingly, by White Nose Syndrome decimating colonies, protecting them isn’t just ethical – it makes sense on every level.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: In which Sam is conflicted.  In 1980 New Zealand had 73%  hydro electricity generation. By  2007 this had dropped to 55%.   Load growth has been largely met by building new gas and coal fired thermal power stations. Consequently CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2005 rose 134% (Barry and Chapman 2009).     With rivers nearing capacity, wind power is about the only option left.  New Zealand currently meets only 2% of its electricity needs through wind generation.   Denmark already has 20%.   This low uptake in NZ is despite being the best place in the world for the efficiency of wind turbines.  Our wind and hills means wind effective turbine productivity is 45%, double the global average (next highest is Australia at 35%, Denmark, for example is only 24%).

So why am I so conflicted?  This weekend I went to the open day of the new Mahinerangi windfarm, near Dunedin.   And I’m in two minds – or rather four hands.   On one hand an extremely efficient source of power, on the other an excuse for us not to face the real problem of profligate consumption. On one hand bespoiling a stunning landscape (and these are 12 of planned 100 in this site alone), on the other these giant structures are seriously elegant.

 

Categories
design

Mark Miller

Mark Miller [ 57:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mark Miller is the General Manager, Applied Design Research Centre.

Shane’s number of the week: 1972 – the year when we were warned that the reactors used in Fukushima were reported as having a dangerous design flaw… and the warning was promptly ignored.

Sam’s Joined-up-thinking: As ground based beings we are good at thinking in two dimensions: backwards and forwards, left and right. We can cope with 3D, up and down, but not as well as birds. We can stretch to think of space-time as constituting 4D. Like the beings in Abbot’s Flatland, we struggle with dimensions outside our normal realm. Perhaps Sustainability is another set of dimensions: scale; cumulative time; system connections; and humility.

 

Air date:  17th March 2011