Published in 1997, this paper tried to attempt to explain the context and definition of three related terms: green design, ecological design, and sustainable design.

Green Design

As a buzzword of the 1980s, “green” was used politics and marketing. In 1980’s “green markets and the emergence of the environmental industry meant that there was no longer a conflict between a green approach to design and business success.”

“Technocentric” and “ecocentric”:

“Technocentric mode is characterized by an unswerving belief in the ability of human science and high technology to manage the environment for the benefit of present and future generations and is based on an ideology of progress, efficiency, rationality, and control, viewing discussions about the wider political, social, or ethical dimensions of the environment with suspicion.”

“The ecocentric attitude is based on bioethics and a deep reverence for nature. It is in favor of low-impact technology, and is concerned with the environmental impact of rampant economic growth and large-scale industrial development; emphasizing, instead, morally and ecologically sound alternatives”

In 1980s, the predominate form of green design represented technocentric or shallow ecological approach. But still possible to identify darker green design such as “consuming less” or “living with less is better than saving energy”

Ecological Design

Tony Fry and Ann-Marie Willis focused on both the immediate task of greening products and the longer-term goals of redefining design and industrial practice.

The term “ecology” was coined in the mid-19th century by Ernst Haeckel to refere to a new sub-branch of biology concerned with the relationship between living organisms and their surroundings. It had social and political implications, too.

Sustinable Design

Sustainability: “the capacity of a system to maintain a continuous flow of whatever each part of that system needs for a healthy existence”

When applied to design, sustainability does not only introduces the ideas of ethical and social responsibility, but also the notion of time and timescale.

“Sustainable design” refers to a broader, longer-term vision of ecodesign. “Analyzing and changing the ’systems’ in which we make, use, and dispose of products.

Green design: project-based, single issue and relatively short term; sustainable design; system-based, long-term, ethical design, extents to which consumption patterns much change,

“Equity”: meeting the needs of all, and “Participation” effective citizen involvement in design-making , without which global sustainble growth would be impossible.

Ezio Manzini has described “ecological approach to design” as a shift from the “normalized ecological design” of the 1980s and the “new radicalism” of the 90s, which increasingly recognizes that ecological design necessitates changes in lifestyles that challenge the current global model of development. In a similar way, Tony Fry argues that ecodesign is the means by which industrial culture can be remade, and that the need to change basic values can only be achieved “by design so long as design itself is redesigned.”

This paper tries to organize the broad clusters of ecodesign strategies according to three foci: product focus, result focus, and needs focus.

Product Focus

• Making existing products more efficient
• Often accompanying with trade-off with new features

Result Rocus

• investigating the way existing products and combinations of resources are distributed, organized, and used
• propose a process of redesigning and rebuilding a more sustainable world from the bottom up and, in so doing, engage a more “active and competent citizenry.”
• switch from the consumption of products to the utilization of seervices
• serving more people with fewer materials

Needs Focus

• societal and cultural perceptions
• contingent upon people and on understanding the way in which people respond to their material surroundings
• human choices and actions
• understanding behavior in many contexts, and to connect with people’s aspirations and expectations

Example:

• Product Focus: washing machine that uses less detergent and energy
• Result Focus: community laundry schemes
• Needs Focus: societal and cultural perceptions about cleanliness

Design documentaries is a design methodology that is a repulsive response to traditional usability-based user research. Whereas traditional user-testing is good for to evaluate the “useful” and “usable” aspects of systems, this new approach aims to address the issues of aesthetics, emotion, personal expressivity, and cultural value.

Bringing documentary film approaches and techniques into user research methods, this paper support researchers who wish to expose people’s rich, idogyncratic and elusive everyday life and understand it on its own terms.

This paper introduces several types of documentary films, which diverse in the level of involvement of makers.

Advantages of this method:

• Focusing on people, not just their needs.
• Providing solid ground for sepculation.
• Stimulating team involvement.
• Embodying a dialectic between the perspective of a researcher/filmmaker and the rich reality that is filmed.

Most importantly, this methods preserve the ambiguous and paradoxical qualities of everyday life to survive in presentations of design research in HCI.

design documentaries serve as a source of both information and inspiration. They inspire through the direct connection with the rich fabric of the everyday; they inform through the vast amounts of high level and detailed information that film can bring across.

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/CSE.2009.91

This paper is about the analysis of national-wide (Belgium, I guess), long duration (four years) mobile phone data. Plus, they used regional census and airtime sharing data. Through the quantitative analysis of the massive data, they induced several results; comparison between rural and urban societies.

However, the results described here is very disappointing. Nothing interesting and new results. Very easy to anticipated. For example, they say “OK, the analysis also validates the commonly accepted view; rural people spend less money, they also make less phone calls.” Even without elaborate statistical results. Another generic insight: a user moved from rural site to urban site tent to make calls to rural site less than he did when he had lived in rural area.

Hence, this report is very sparse. This could have been done as an internal report in a mobile company 15 years ago.

No context is discussed either. Simply categorizing rural-urban-capital cannot be applied to all mobile usage cases.

One contemplation: the used data in this research is very valuable and has a lot of promising applications I supposed. However, they used the data only to validate pre-defined hypothesis. How can we find new insights that were impossible to think beforehand?

This short editorial presents four directions in the research of pervasive computing that promotes environmental sustainability. The four foci are:

1. Perishable goods supply chain: Pervasive technologies have great potential to improve the efficiency of this food supply chain. For example, the use of a sensor-based first-expire-first-out (FEFO) issuing policy can increase efficiency tremendously, in contrast to the conventional first-in-first-out (FIFO) issuing policy.
2. Agriculture enterprise: To protect regions damaged by agricultural activities, pervasive technologies promote the protection of natural resources while supporting a large-scale commercial enterprise.
3. Use-driven domestic energy use: there’s evidence that technology-enabled feedback of domestic energy consumption can promote awareness and lead to energy savings.
4. Mobile phones on environmental damage: there are many research topic regarding this. One example is the end-of-use practices such as reusing, recycling, re-gifting, throwing away, and destroying mobile phones.

The final, but apparently too obvious, constrain is the conflict between economic conditions and environmental sustainability.

Currently, I am studying the theoretical and historical background of persuasive infovis, and analyze the design attributes that makes infovis meaningful enough to be argumentative and leads to impact on users’ mind. The robust argument is now being prepared for a publication.

This study is advised by prof. John Stasko at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech.

This project is advised by prof. Ian Bogost, and collaborate with the members of Journalism and Games Project.

• This project is presented at the InfoVis poster section at VisWeek 2009.
• Please read the paper and poster.

Advised by prof. John Stasko (CS7450 Information Visualization, Spring 2009), co-project with Heeyoung Jeong, Matt Bonner, and Yee Chieh Chew.

• This project is presented at the InfoVis poster section at VisWeek 2009.
• Please read the paper and poster.

Advised by prof. John Stasko (CS7450 Information Visualization, Spring 2009), co-project with Hwajung Hong.