Perspectives on greener product development and manufacturing from Sustainable Minds, our partners, customers and contributors.

  • LUNAR Elements Case Study - SanDisk ImageMate card readers

    by Scot Herbst on November 21, 2008
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    Co-Author: Travis Lee – It’s not uncommon that I’m asked the simple question “what exactly is product design?” It’s a fair enough inquiry – removing yourself from the product development process just long enough to surface for air, you might realize that it’s extremely unusual for the average human to have even a basic understanding of how a product ends up on the retail shelf. My answers vary on the context, but quite often I find myself using the ‘architecture’ analogy:

    Products, like buildings, grow from the collaborative exchange of ideas between a designer and engineer as they arrive at a resolution that both looks great and actually works.

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    There exists a level of familiarity with the face of the architect that resonates with people. And as more architects begin to speak the language of ‘green-building’ more well-rounded designers and engineers are beginning to speak the language of ‘green design.’ Of course, the very phrase begs the question “what is green design?” We could simply say “Green design is like green building: the act of creating a physical element with as little environmental and social damage as possible.” Or, more memorably, we could quickly walk you through an average product design process here at LUNAR.

    Employing the virtues outlined in LUNAR’s “Designers Field Guide” we identified 15 discreet activities in the design and engineering process. A LUNAR Elements Case Study of the next generation of Sandisk ImageMate card-readers helps illustrate our typical approach to best environmental practices. Here are some of our favorites (please feel free to reference the Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability document for a more complete analysis):

    1. Question the premise of the design. LUNAR began the ideation phase by deconstructing the intent of the product, ultimately arriving at the simplified architecture as a metaphor for reducing the esthetic and physical complexity of a highly visible desktop computer component. We reduced total part count to four!

    5. Avoid toxic or harmful materials and chemicals. We eliminated paint on the plastic enclosures in favor of molded-in color. We also eliminated the need for an extra process to apply the logo by molding it into the plastic enclosures. We finished the zinc base with a bead-blast in lieu of the highly common chrome finish.

    6. Reduce size and weight. LUNAR minimized the enclosure volume and made the product as thin and light as possible by revisiting the internal layout and conceptualizing a better architecture.

    12. Make it modular. The base of the product is modular and it can be used for multiple products in the ImageMate line.

    13. Use recyclable materials. ABS enclosures are recyclable, and all the parts can be separated for ease of material disposal.

    14. Minimize fasteners. No fasteners are used in these products. The plastic enclosures are ultrasonically welded and the rest of the parts (magnets, label and rubber feet) are glued.

    15. Do not use paint. Paint was not required for any of the plastic components.

    The Elements Case Study process highlights some of the decisions that were made during each product’s development in an effort to better understand those initiatives that have can have a positive environmental effect. If even an incremental difference, the result for LUNAR is a thoughtfully conceived, more gorgeous product language that exudes our own values and beliefs.

    Please visit Sandisk.com for more info on the LUNAR- designed ImageMate family.

  • What is Sustainable Interaction Design? Part Two: Invention and Disposal

    by Guest contributors on November 21, 2008
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    This is the second of three blog posts by our managing editor Jeff Binder exploring the concept of sustainable interaction design as put forth by Eli Blevis of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, in a paper entitled Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse.*

    LINKING INVENTION & DISPOSAL

    What happens to your old laptop computer? The disturbing reality is that even under the best of intentions, many of our most advanced products can end up in developing countries, part of a “charity shipment,” where they are not only useless, but unrecyclable.

    Such an outcome demands a new approach. In a paper entitled Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse Eli Blevis presents the idea that we should be more cognizant of where products might end up when we sit down to design them.

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    “…any design of new objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies is incomplete without a corresponding account of what will become of the objects or systems that are displaced or obsoleted by such inventions.”

    Software, he explains, is not only a product of invention, but often its neglectful mother.

    “…it is apparent that software is material that prompts physical qualities in the sense that it drives the demand for new hardware, and as such it causes pre-mature disposal of perfectly adequate physical materials through obsolescence – too often, software may be almost wholly defined as that insidious material of digital artifice that causes the premature obsolescence of physical materials.

    “Newly invented hardware capabilities in turn prompt the invention of new software. To my knowledge, the data needed to understand the scope of this principle as an hypothesis does not exist-it would be an important undertaking to uncover such information in a systematic way.’”

    Ironically, through the best of intentions, we end up ‘dumping’ our discards where they cannot be used, discarded, or recycled properly.

    “Writing in the journal "Environmental Health Perspectives", Charles Schmidt [39] reports that: ‘Hungry for information technology but with a limited capacity to manufacture it, Africa has become the world's latest destination for obsolete electronic equipment. Much of this material is more or less functional and provided in good faith by well-meaning donors. But the brokers who arrange these exports often pad shipping containers with useless junk, essentially saddling African importers with electronic garbage.’"

    Blevis notes that many manufacturers of personal computers have recycling programs. That is laudable…but could they go farther?

    “The Hewlett Packard (HP) company does have a program that allows consumers and businesses to trade-in old equipment, even equipment that was not manufactured by HP… The company accepts any old equipment for recycling – non HP equipment is accepted at the consumer's expense. It costs $9.00 US plus shipping to recycle a laptop computer. The company claims to handle 3 million pounds of equipment per month, claiming to reduce such equipment to raw materials for the manufacture of new equipment. Apple Computer has a similar program, as does Dell, according to company web¬sites.

    “While these programs are possibly laudable, the heart of the matter is much more complex than just providing an outlet for conscientious consumers to discard their old computing devices when they wish to acquire new ones. There are a lot of question to ask: What is driving this consumption? Why can't such devices be designed to be more easily upgraded to newer technologies? How many consumers will actually pay to responsibly dispose of old equipment?’”

    Another answer, driven by consumer demand and fostered by a new approach to product marketing, is to make older (i.e. heirloom) products more desirable by making the idea of those products fashionable.

    “Such preferences are a matter of fashion and design, rather than engineering and feature-driven marketing. For example, there are many mp3 players that preceded the Apple iPod, but Apple succeeded in turning the mp3 player into an item of fashion both through the design of form and through the design of systemic support in the guise of iTunes. A sustainability proposition in this case is that to be truly responsible from the perspective of sustainability, Apple needs to use its fashion and design talents to make it chic to want to own and keep an heirloom quality iPod, even if some of its components need to be updated from time to time and rather than making it fashionable to have the new and latest iPod. The hopeful corollary to this proposition is that if people begin to prefer long lasting digital products that can be updated rather than disposed, companies like Apple will respond with appropriate fashion, design, and marketing models, and other companies will follow.”

    Sooner or later, manufacturers and consumers will come hard up against our need for novelty. It’s vital in this context for design to anticipate upgrades – to be “hardware-preserving.”

    “The observation that the iPod looks to be inspired in form by the Dieter Rams 1959 design for the Braun TPI radio is so pervasive that it is hard to know whom to credit. The comparison demonstrates that the invention on Apple's part is not so much in the product form, but rather in many other aspects of the design's context. One would have hoped that the digital nature of the media that the iPod houses would be hardware-preserving and as timeless as a quality radio. Sadly, the re-invention by Apple of its own product from time to time – from the original iPod to the mini to the nano – is a deliberately unsustainable act intent on driving consumption and with the clear side effect of premature disposal.”

    This is not an unreachable ideal. A good example of this approach to design is the Leica camera. Blevis notes that to many photographers, Leicas are professional objects of heirloom quality.

    “Many of these cameras are still in use, even in the digital age. The lenses made for these cameras still fit modem versions of the camera, including the long¬ awaited and unimaginably expensive digital version which has just come to market and which looks not very different than these earlier examples – this backwards compatibility of such critical components as lenses is an act of sustainable design more typical of professional quality tools than consumer products.”

    Recreating the Leica ideal in other products will require a deep shift in the way most products are designed and marketed today. It starts with the idea of linking invention and disposal.

    “From a designerly perspective of sustainability, the issue of how invention drives disposal means understanding why people want new things and looking for ways to get them to prefer the alternatives to such cycles of acquisition and disposal. One hopes that the companies will respond to such changes in preferences should they be achieved with new marketplace models, such as models that create incentives for renewal & reuse, rather than acquisition of new things and disposal of old ones, or models that create incentives for shared use.”

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    * -- Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 503-512.
    Paper available for download from the ACM digital library: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705
    Publications list for Eli Blevis: http://eli.informatics.indiana.edu/selectedpublications.html

  • Going down stream: a work in progress

    by David Laituri on November 15, 2008
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    When is the right time to develop a product end of life strategy? Now, roughly – give or take a day. Even though our first product has been in-market for about a year and we shouldn’t expect to ‘need’ a product take-back/recycling program for our customers for many years to come, we believe there is plenty that can be learned by working on it now. We’re testing our prototype process with a small batch of un-recoverable, stripped carcasses from early development and customer service returns; it turns out that our systems have been surprisingly easy to repair and upgrade, leaving very few to work with in this test. It’s an important victory for our sustainability mission; many early design decisions are already paying off. While our customer service return rate is fairly low (good quality), the scrap rate from those is even lower (good sustainable design features).

    We started on the design process of this program as most do: we networked with others for advice, read through whatever available material we could find, even brought in an advisor in to look over our shoulder and check our work. We chose a recycler that had the same position as we do on e-waste recycling: they promised that no recovered materials would leave the country. Our tour of their facility answered (and generated) many questions about how our inbound material would be handled, how a system would be de-manufactured and materials separated and where they would end up. So here’s the challenge: we’re still trying to get further down stream, hopefully as far as seeing new raw material be made from our scrap material. The recycler said they had no problem introducing us to their PC board, plastic and wood reclamation resources, but have they come through? Not yet. Will they? We hope so.

    Our first product, the Vers 2X, has only been on the market for about a year. With an estimated lifespan of five years, it does at times feel a bit early to be taking this step at this stage of our existence. As with my earlier piece here on the value of ‘up-streaming’ (visiting your suppliers’ suppliers), we are using this down-streaming process to understand where our materials end up and to improve our future products under development. It will only work, however, if we can get access to two or more levels of the downstream value chain.

    When managing the parts of the product development we don’t own – contract manufacturing up front and electronics recycling on the back end in our case, we’ve learned that it all comes down to trust and transparency; our partners establish the first when they deliver the second. Our manufacturing partners have done a solid job of taking us up-stream and we are hoping our chosen recycling partner ‘candidate’ here comes through on the down-stream side.

    We have picked up a couple things from the down-stream project that we are already applying:

    Handle as much as you can yourself – prep your materials, it’s the only way to assure the right materials will end up in the right place – especially the low-value ones.

    Avoid turn-key solutions – do your own integration of your downstream partners – again, this will assure that the highest percentage of any particular material ends up in the place where it will most likely be recycled, not land filled or sent to another country.

    Don’t believe it until you see it – ask to see where each material ends up, ask for an intro to those who take your recycler’s materials. If they set you up without question, you’ve probably found a good one. If there is any hesitation, you may want to keep looking.

    Run a test project – this will help sensitize your whole team to the downstream de-manufacturing challenge, and will help improve future products and processes as well.

  • So where is the Green Mafia?

    by Lorne Craig on November 15, 2008
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    Picture Big Oil, and what comes to mind? Lush, leather and dark-wood upholstered boardrooms, thick polished tables surrounded by equally thick, polished grey-haired old men, lit from spotlights above, their cold, steely eyes in perpetual shadow. These are the power brokers who, with a single conference call, can arrange corporate tax breaks, kill environmental legislation, and install dictators in questionable democracies like Canada.

    So who does the Green Business Movement have? Ralph Nader on a megaphone? Leonardo DiCaprio firing killer looks from his Prius? Al Gore and his laser-powered Powerpoint pointer?

    Face it, to make any serious difference, we need a secret society. A group of influential people who have the ear of every politician in power, who can make things very uncomfortable for businesses who don’t play by Mother Nature’s rules, not to mention greasing the wheels for entrepreneurs who need a little government help to get things going.

    A little backroom handshake, and suddenly money is being diverted from arms production to build streetcars for a flurry of public transit projects that were mysteriously approved. A late night phone call, and a radical new electric car design is rushed through the government approval process just in time for the new model season. An anonymous donation to the Widowed Trees Fund and the next day a new law is passed banning disposable plastic forks, just as factories are tooling up to make biodegradable starch cutlery.

    And somewhere in the background, small grassroots groups of chemical companies, coal mining execs and defense contractors write their congressmen, hold bake sales and host neighborhood rallies in protest. OK, I’m just dreaming that last part.

    But it does beg the question, from where will the sustainable power base emerge?

    Well, ladies and gentlemen of the New Green Economy, it will probably have to be us. Taking time from our busy careers to join associations. Working together with our competitors to advance common interests. Meeting politicians, or God help us, running for office ourselves. We may never match the might of hundreds of years of old economy money rattling around the halls of power, but one day we’ll be old, too. And with a little luck and hard work, we may carry enough weight to tip the playing field just a little closer to level.

    In the meantime, I can be bribed. Not that it will get you anywhere right now, but someday….
     

    Image credit: Lorne Craig

  • Can China renew an ancient idea of sustainability?

    by Ken Hall on November 7, 2008
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    China has fascinated me since my youth, and yet when the invitation came to give a speech in Beijing on Sustainability, I felt some trepidation. As the fossil-fueled economic might of China grows and its population achieves increasing affluence, our fear in the West increases – we worry about contaminated products and worker safety, a new coal plant a week and pollution drifting across the Pacific to the West Coast. We worry about escalating costs due to increasing competition for fossil fuels and industrial materials such as cement and steel. Having just returned from Beijing, I am greatly encouraged – and although we still have much to fear, that fear should be equally placed (and perhaps more so) with ourselves.

    What encourages me (besides the great reception of the Chinese people themselves) is the conscious messaging of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the very nature of this 5,000-year-old civilization. Entering Beijing, one is immediately struck by messaging to achieve a ‘Harmonious Society.’ With origins in Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, this messaging has evolved over the last decade from a buzzword into a paradigm. The China Business Weekly (Oct. 20-26, 2008) had a two-page spread on Energy/Environment in which they say, “(Chinese President Hu Jintao) emphasizes the establishment of a harmonious socialist society, which features democracy and the rule of law, equity and justice, honesty and fraternity, vigor and vitality, stability and order, and harmony between man and nature.”*

    In addition, the CPC has implemented a key strategic initiative with the Scientific Outlook on Development that has reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide by 3.96% and chemical oxygen demand (a measure of water pollution) by 2.48% compared to the same period last year. Additionally, the Scientific Outlook for Development has contributed a national goal to China’s 11th Five Year Plan to cut energy consumption by up to 20% per unit of GDP and reduce major pollutants by up to 10% by 2010.

    But what really encourages me are statements made by President Hu during his keynote address last October to the 17th National Congress. According to the China Business Weekly, “Hu said construction of an ecological civilization is one of the requirements for China to build an affluent society. Hu noted that building awareness of resource conservation and an environmentally friendly society should be a priority ahead of industrialization and modernization, starting from every department, and even every family.”

    You might argue that this is simply rhetoric from politicians (although not our politicians), but I believe it is conscious messaging from the leadership of China that builds on a foundation of 5,000 years of Chinese thought about the harmonious society and harmony between man and nature. Although our current political rhetoric is about change, it might be that China is actually changing for the betterment of the whole world and we have been unable or unwilling to see it. For me personally, the notion of China creating an ecological civilization is in the bones of the Chinese people – as an architect I can see it in their ancient civilization and landscape designs. It left me with a whole new appreciation of their Olympic slogan, “One World, One Dream.”

    I believe the time has come to set aside our differences about who should sign on to the Kyoto Protocol when, and recognize that we both need to de-carbonize our economies. Let’s do it together and help the whole world create an ecological civilization. One World, One Dream.

    * -- Emphasis is my addition.

    Image credit: Ken Hall

  • What is Sustainable Interaction Design? Part One

    by Guest contributors on November 7, 2008

    This is the first of three blog posts by our managing editor Jeff Binder exploring the concept of sustainable interaction design as put forth by SM blog contributor Eli Blevis of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, in a paper entitled Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse.*

    We humans have a love affair with interactive technology, and why shouldn’t we? Inventions like the telephone, the Internet and the camera have made it easier it to communicate concepts of both immediate practical value and broader cultural worth.

    Whether it’s to get driving directions or view a photo exhibit, technology has made our lives easier and has enriched our understanding of the world. But that comes with a price.

    Because we love technology, we admire early adopters, awarding them status merely for owning the latest laptop first. We overlook the fact that early adopters are also by definition early rejecters; like bored children they toss out gadgets without considering where they might end up.

    It’s up to product designers to retool the process, says Eli Blevis, a faculty member of the School of Informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington.

    Blevis, whose primary arena is Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d), has been a central figure in the definition and development of how interaction design should progress. In a paper written in 2007, he defines the concept of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID).

    Design, according to Blevis, is the act of choosing among, or informing choices of future ways of being. His basic premise is that sustainability must be a central focus of interaction design. But sustainability is a vague term, used and abused by many. Blevis is careful to proscribe its use in the context of interaction design:

    “Sustainability as a notion of viable futures can be defined to include aspects of the environment, public health, social equality and justice, as well as other conditions and choices about humanity and the biosphere [14]. In what follows, the focus is primarily on environmental sustainability and the link between interactive technologies and the use of resources, both from the point of view of how interactive technologies can be used to promote more sustainable behaviors and—with more emphasis here—from the point of view of how sustainability can be applied as a critical lens to the design of interactive systems, themselves.”

    Blevis goes on to identify five vital principals to serve as goals for Sustainable Interaction Design (SID):

    “… (i) linking invention & disposal—by which I mean the idea that any design of new objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies is incomplete without a corresponding account of what will become of the objects or systems that are displaced or obsoleted by such inventions, (ii) promoting renewal & reuse—by which I mean the idea that the design of objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies implies the need to first and foremost consider the possibilities for renewal & reuse of existing objects or systems from the perspective of sustainability … (iii) promoting quality & equality—by which I mean the idea that the design of new objects or systems with embedded materials of information technologies implies the need to consider quality as a construct of affect and longevity and quality in the sense of anticipating means of renewal & reuse, thereby motivating the prolonged value of such objects or systems and providing equality of experience to new owners of such objects and systems whenever ownership transfers, (iv) de-coupling ownership & identity—by which I mean the idea that the virtual world has irrevocably changed the way in which ownership of information and in particular ownership of personal identity are constructed and secured and that alternative notions of ownership and identity have design implications for sharing materials, intellectual commons, and sense of self-hood which must be considered as part of sustainable design of interactions with digital artifice, and (v) using natural models & reflection—by which I mean the prospect that there may be an approach to interaction design-even by the design of its removal-that prompts sustainable relationships to nature and that SID begins with a reflection on this principle of making the world of the artificial more like the natural world with respect to sustainability.”

    The central problem of sustainability in the context of HCI, is its human-centeredness:

    “The very title Human-Computer Interaction has embedded within it meanings which are problematic from the perspectives of sustainability—it is anthropocentric, and even if the anthropocentrism was not in-and-of-itself a condition of ontological blindness, the sense of human-centeredness in the HCI context is oftentimes construed as a notion of method in which engineering "needs and requirements" follow from cognitive models of ''users,'' rather than a concern for human conditions, particular or global.”

    Other writers, points out Blevis, have identified another basic flaw: that HCI as a discipline has not yet understood sustainability to be a central design idea.

    “Notions of sustainability and design are common nonetheless, there is little written specifically about sustainability and interaction design in the main corpus of the HCI literature-the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) digital library in particular-and concern for sustainability in the arena of interaction design is in an apparent infancy.

    “One of the reviewers of this paper provided the following very insightful summary statement of much of its spirit: "sustainability [should be] more than just recycling, and indeed [must become] a cultural paradigm shift away from technology novelty and induced consumption, toward an aesthetic of well-cared-for systems. "That same reviewer suggested that understanding the role of technology in such ambitions for cultural change is key-an understanding which this paper modestly frames as important research for the larger community of HCI and interaction design.”

    Clearly, how we deal with the sustainability of the human-computer interaction is becoming recognized as a topic of major importance. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have announced “sustainability initiatives.” But what is the context for their programs, and how are they to be verified? Thought leaders like Eli Blevis are helping to frame the debate.

    In the next post, I’ll explore the first of two major ideas presented in Blevis’ paper: the idea of linking invention and disposal. I encourage you to comment on these concepts by clicking on the link below.

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    14. Fry, T. (2005). The Voice of sustainment: the scenario of design. Design Philosophy Papers. #01/2005.

    * -- Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 503-512.
    Paper available for download from the ACM digital library: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705
    Publications list for Eli Blevis: http://eli.informatics.indiana.edu/selectedpublications.html

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    Image credits: cell phone: © Pedro Díaz, rotary phone: © Marc Dietrich, leica: © Ruslan Gilmanshin

     

  • How to get better product use data? Track it in environmental monitoring social networks.

    by Inês Sousa on November 3, 2008
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    My last post asked a few questions about how new product design approaches could promote sustainable consumption. Along the same lines, let’s explore how product designers might collect better and more data on product use to inform the ecodesign process. Potential solutions present some quite promising ideas for product designers. Think of it as a wildlife-tagging program for products monitored in social networks.

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    Here’s how I frame the issue:

    What are appropriate strategies and tools that could help design teams create products supporting collaborative environmental monitoring to inform ecodesign and motivate sustainable behavior? How can collected data be timely incorporated into product design such that it can inform both designers and consumers in a participatory ecodesign setting?

    Cristina Gouveia and colleagues1, 2 explored the role of the public in environmental monitoring beyond isolated initiatives and official environmental monitoring networks. Information and communication technologies (ICT) can empower citizens to develop environmental collaborative monitoring networks (ECMN) with environmental data collected by volunteers and community-building mechanisms promoting behavioral changes.

    The building blocks of ECMN are motivated citizens, sensing devices and back-end information infrastructure. Individuals can use their households, offices or schools as fixed stations for environmental monitoring; they can also be mobile sensors using mobile communication and computing to collect and communicate in situ and real-time environmental data. Ultimately, ECMN promote collaboration among the different stakeholders – from the general citizen to environmental experts and decision-makers.

    The Sustainability Information Lab at UC Berkeley is also conducting interesting research projects exploring how information about the environmental, social, and health effects of products and companies is provided to consumers in the marketplace. For example, they are assessing and recommending new information infrastructure and institutional designs that can make more credible and relevant information available to the public, companies, governments, and consumers. New technologies, such as RFID chips embedded inside products, may support much more effective flows of product and environmental information along supply chains.

    So, what if product designers and consumers collaborate in ECMN-driven social networks? What if environmental information systems and infrastructures of companies are designed to go beyond their supply chain and monitor the environmental performance of their products during use?

    For example, in a participatory ecodesign monitoring system and social network, consumers would provide tracking data with sensors, such as GPS and RFID chips3 or other smart sensors embedded in the products they use and discard. These data would inform the design team in real time about product environmental performance from real use, while potentially raising consumers’ environmental awareness concerning their use of products.

    Collected data could also be used in portals such as PEMS Web (Public Environmental Modeling and Simulation Web). PEMS provides the general public with access to a web of computer-based, environmental models and simulations shared by experts and researchers from around the world. The simulations provided by PEMS Web could further inspire new product design strategies and consumer’s sustainable behavior.

    What is fascinating about these approaches is not just that they have the potential to provide volumes of product-use data and simulations relatively easily, and thus better inform product designers to devise appropriate ecodesign strategies. They also provide yet another way to move towards sustainable consumption by collaboratively mobilizing public awareness and promoting informed consumption and behavior change.

     

    References

    1. Gouveia, C, Fonseca, A., Câmara, A., Ferreira, F. (2004). Promoting the Use of Environmental Data Collected by Concerned Citizens through Information and Communication Technologies. Journal of Environmental Management 71 (2): 135-154.
    2. Gouveia, Cristina (2008). Environmental Collaborative Monitoring: Linking Senses. Ph.D. Thesis. New University of Lisbon, Portugal.
    3. Lee, J.A. & Thomas, V.M. (2004). GPS and Radio Tracking of End-of-Life Products. In Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, pp. 312-309.

    Image:

    • source: ECMN  | credit: Cristina Gouveia

  • The death of global warming: Sustainability 2.0 and design’s dirty little secret

    by Scot Herbst on November 3, 2008

    Escape with me for a few moments here – let’s play a visualization game. Close your eyes. You’ve inherited the role of Climate-Change Agent Alpha. You’re a relatively affluent consuming American, capable of meeting the fight against carbon emissions head-on. Your typical day looks something like this:

    Wake up in the morning; refer to a series of wall-mounted monitors in your home that give you an endless relay of appliance energy consumption. You escape to work in a hybrid vehicle equipped with an unavoidable heads-up display offering a relentless series of digital algorithms to immediately inform your driving power usage. You’re greeted at work by an active-energy savings billboard espousing the minute-by-minute virtues of the power friendly LEED certified building. Throughout your day you refer to a special app on your cell phone that intermittently monitors your homes regenerative solar capacity. And finally, at day’s end, you retire confidently, having seen your ‘smart-home’ monitor flash a graphic depicting your ‘carbon neutrality’ for the day! An endless blitz of data and graphic information injected into your cognition, affording you the tools to continue consuming, eating and breathing in a responsible manner. The assumption could be that given an ambiguous concept like the ‘carbon footprint,’ we need constant reminders of our mission’s grand purpose. Mission accomplished Climate-Change Agent Alpha. You’ve made the world one day better by staving off your footprint… right?

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    The painful reality is this: your ‘carbon footprint’ isn’t a ‘footprint’ at all. It’s airborne. Intangible. An esoteric concept, blown around with the winds of political opportunism. Politicians literally script environmental treatises from the leather seats of their Lear Jets, in a frenzied effort to simultaneously win voter approval and justify their omnipotent role as ‘great messenger change-agent’ bearing a torch too important to be saddled with the burden of personal accountability. Even the science behind global warming is fuzzy. For every renowned scholar identifying the human causes of the global warming trend, another laureate emerges with an empirical analysis citing that same warming trend since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Then there’s population growth. GDP. Consumption. It’s not going to slow down. Ideology is no match for economics. Bundle this fundamental reality with campaign rhetoric and add to that a litany of ‘green’ marketing slogans on the sides of boxes and you’ve left with one thing: Green Fatigue.

    And through it all, design’s dirty little secret is this: we're still more concerned with sustaining humans on the face of the earth than the earth itself, and most of our efforts go toward mitigating externalities rather than changing fundamentals. As designers and engineers we can effect no greater change than the influence that our creations have on the lives of humans in the supply chain. Go to China; see unventilated buildings filled with men painting computer chassis devoid of a single respirator. Go to India and watch the chrome-plating process in all of its glory, the effluents attacking clean water supplies. Or look domestically; stripping metals from discarded electronics has been deemed too sensitive a process by the EPA, forcing spent printed circuit boards to fill cargo containers on the return trip to the Far East for unregulated human handling.

    The design community is fortunate to work with companies and organizations with RoHS (restriction on hazardous substances, as originally defined by the EU) compliance. HP is one of LUNAR’s most devoted allies on the front to reduce the downstream effect of product development, and is now fully RoHS compliant across its portfolio spanning thousands of SKUs. But ultimately, the responsibility falls on each of us as individuals involved in the sourcing process. Effecting an immediate impact on a human-scale should be the primary focus of our sustainability efforts.

    For too long politics have hijacked the environmental dialogue in an effort to cram ‘global warming’ down our throats, and as the global economy cools off we’ll have time to formulate a new approach to our collective efforts before the manufacturing machine again heats up to critical mass...get ready for Sustainability 2.0: Human Sustainability.

    For a glimpse of the efforts we’re undertaking @ LUNAR, visit http://lunarelements.blogspot.com/ to view the Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability.