Presented by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), this interdisciplinary conference explores the range of design thinking necessary to create a socially and ecologically responsible society. Designers, manufacturers and business leaders come together to find inspiration, share knowledge and explore real world opportunities for transforming products, industries and lives.

Speakers included Eames Demetrios of Eames Office, Saul Griffith of Makani Power, Allan Chochinov of Core 77, California College of the Arts (CCA) Design MBA Chair Nathan Shedroff, climate strategist Michel Gelobter, John Bielenberg and Pam Dorr of Project M and the HERO Housing Resource in Alabama, Emily Pilloton of Project H Design, and Autodesk Sustainable Design Program Manager Dawn Danby.

You can read more about Allan Chochinov’s talk here, and also Nathan Shedroff’s excellent talk is online.

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“What I found surprising all through this process was the lack of any kind of standard process for managing key escrow as part of estate planning. Military-grade crypto has been in civilian hands for decades now, and yet every lawyer I spoke to about this was baffled (and the cypherpunks I spoke to were baffling – given to insanely complex schemes that suggested to me that their executors were going to be spending months unwinding their keys before they could get on with the business of their estates, and woe betide their survivors, who’d be left in the cold while all this was taking place).

Meanwhile, I’m left with this conclusion: if you’re not encrypting your data, you should be. And if you are encrypting your data, you need to figure this stuff out, before you get hit by a bus and doom your digital life to crypto oblivion.”

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The article, which also describes two emerging design practices (catalyst design and performance design), is a highly recommended read.

A few quotes:

“We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences? What, ultimately, is the role of the designer in sorting through these desires to determine which should drive our design decisions? And what frameworks, other than intuition, should we use to make these judgments?”

“What we are beginning to appreciate is the degree to which user behavior is ALWAYS subject to influence. We should not assume that our role is to somehow remove those influences so that the user can act in a free and unconstrained manner to achieve their own needs, as that is impossible. The user is not a self-contained actor in the system, but one who is largely and continually open to influences, the most important of which he/she is generally not conscious of. Our design decisions are just one influence among many, not categorically different, and often not the most effective in motivating the user to achieve their desired aims.”

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Following the success of drivers of change 2006 publication, Arup Foresight recently published an update.

This new set of 175 cards investigates leading drivers in greater depth that have particular relevance to the work of Arup. They include energy, waste, climate change, water, demographics, urbanisation and poverty.

The cards can be used for developing business strategy, brainstorming, education and to help the reader to gain greater knowledge of the issues which are driving global change. The publication also encourages us to think holistically and creatively.

Also check out the various Arup Foresight blogs:
* future frequency
* emtech primer (by Duncan Wilson)
* global village
* foresight podcasts
* city of sound (by Dan Hill)

Reboot Britain will explore the role new technologies and online networks can play in driving economic growth and radically changing public services. The programme will begin with a one day event on 6th July which will look at the challenges faced as a country and how the combination of a new digital technologies and networked ‘Digital Britons’ can produce innovative solutions to tackle them.

Diane Coyle (leading economist and author) on the Reboot Britain essays
The essays in this collection were commissioned as ‘provocations’. They have lived up to that challenge. The areas covered include education, entrepreneurship, healthcare, climate change, democracy – in fact the whole terrain of politics and public policy.

Lee Bryant (Headshift) on How people power can reboot Britain
Placing people at the centre of a more innovative and more agile public sector is Lee Bryant’s priority, to enable ‘smart’ government – ‘big’ in its inclusiveness, ‘small’ in its bureaucracy. Fewer initiatives, more open data, and more feedback from users are required to deliver this.

Andy Hobsbawm (Green Thing/Agency.com) – All Together Now: social media to social good
Andy reminds us that socially motivated activity is an intrinsic part of life and celebrates how this is already being organised and aggregated online in powerful ways. New ways of contributing together with the highly visible ways in which the impact of that participation can be seen hold the potential for an unprecedented level of global action and global understanding.

Paul Miller (School of Everything) – Weary giants and new technology
Paul hopes that an ecology of private start-ups, social entrepreneurs and government investment can be created to deliver services that are better and more effectively targetted. The digital world is not about content, but about organisation, he argues; cyberspace is not a world apart but rather a tool for re-imagining and re-creating the real world. READ IT!!

Micah Sifry with his Lessons from America
Micah takes from President Obama’s campaigning and early months in government the lesson that open and collaborative government with many, many citizens involved is feasible and powerful. And notes that this embrace of online power is ‘inherently disruptive’: “What happens when those numbers climb into the millions, and people who have been invited to have a voice now expect to be listened to?”

Tom Steinberg (mySociety) talks about how Open House in Westminster
Tom assesses where the culture of transparency enabled by the internet can powerfully be applied to parliamentary processes in a way that is truly transformative. This is much more of a challenge than simply becoming competent in the latest tools and technologies, but instead requires a deep level of understanding of the capabilities of the internet together with an appetite for radical openness.

Paul Hodgkin (Patient Opinion) on How the new economics of voice will change the NHS
Paul wisely puts the promise of technology in its social context and argues that managers in healthcare must build productive technology-mediated relationships with patients. If they do, they will learn much from the empowered and passionate citizenry.

Jon Watts (MTM London) on Getting the balance right
Jon notes the opportunities the digital world offers new businesses but sounds a warning about the limits, too, for British companies lacking the scale needed to compete effectively in increasingly crowded media markets. He offers some proposals that focus on the needs of emerging UK innovators and, most importantly, on what he describes as: “The collective, collaborative efforts of the people we used to refer to as the audience.”

Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital) looks at A day in Entrepreneur Country
Julie would also like to see less of the wrong kind of government. She argues that despite a significant cultural shift, Britain is a long way from reaching the destination of ‘Entrepreneur Country’, and amongst her many recommendations is simply less cash being taken out of new businesses in taxes.

Daniel Heaf (4iP) on Next please – placing your bets in the digital economy
Dan wants to ensure Britain controls its own digital destiny by properly directed investment, using public value as a guiding light for private businesses as well as public organisations – and all the more so as taxpayer money is supporting so much new technology investment.

Welcome to Lift!
Lift founder Laurent Haug and Lift France chair Daniel Kaplan will explain the theme and organization of the conference.

Initial and necessary challenge: “Technology & Society: Know your History!”
Is technology liberating us or enslaving us? Hardly a new question, says Dominique Pestre… He will thus challenge us to raise our level of thinking and, in searching for an answer, to embrace dissensus and complexity: How can we welcome techno-skeptics in order to produce more sustainable technologies? Can we really believe that green techs will allow us to avoid drastic (and collective) choices on how we live? How can the interaction between markets, democracy, usage, science, code, become more productive?
Keynote: Dominique Pestre, historian of Science, EHESS, Paris

Changing Things (1) – The Internet of Things is not what you think it is!
If the “Internet of things” was just about adding chips, antennas and interactivity to the things we own, it would be no big deal. Discover a wholly different perspective: Open, unfinished objects which can be transformed and reprogrammed by their users; Objects that document their own components, history, lifecycle; Sensitive and noisy objects that capture, process, mix and publish information. Discover an Internet of Things which intends to transform the industrial world as deeply as the current Internet transformed the world of communication and media.
Keynote: Bruce Sterling, writer, author of Shaping Things
They do it for real: Usman Haque (haque :: design + research / Pachube) and Timo Arnall (Elastic Space)

Video: Timo Arnall: “Making Things Visible” [22:13]
A designer and researcher at Oslo School of Architecture, Timo Arnall offers here his perspective about networked objects and ubiquitous computing. His presentation, and the intriguing design examples he takes, highlights two phenomena. On the one hand, he describes how sensors and RFIDs can enable to “make things visible” as the title of his presentation expresses. On the other hand, he shows the importance of going beyond screen-based interactions.

Changing Things (2) – Fab Labs, towards decentralized design and production of material products
Existing or unheard-of things, designed, modified, exchanged and manufactured by individuals or entrepreneurs anywhere in the world; Local workshops equipped with 3D printers and digital machine-tools, able to produce (almost) anything out of its 3D model; P2P object-sharing networks… Are “Fab Labs” heralding a new age of industrial production?
Keynote: Mike Kuniavsky, designer, ThingM
They do it for real: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Tinker.it) and Michael Shiloh (OpenMoko / MakingThings)

Changing Innovation (1)- The end of IT
Today, corporate information systems are innovation’s worst enemies. They set organizations and processes in stone. They restrict the enterprise’s horizons and its networks. They distort its view of the world. But ferments of change emerge. Meet those who breathe new air into current organizations, those who design tomorrow’s Innovation Systems.
Keynote: Marc Giget (Cnam)
They do it for real: Euan Semple (Social computing for the business world) and Martin Duval (Bluenove)

Changing Innovation (2) – Innovating with the non-innovators
Innovating used to be a job in itself. It has become a decentralized procès which includes, in no particular order, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, activists, and users who reinvent the products they were supposed to consume. Why is that important? What does it really change? And where will it stop? WILL it stop somewhere?
Keynote: Catherine Fieschi, Counterpoint/British Council
They do it for real: Marcos Garcia (Madrid’s Medialab-Prado) and Douglas Repetto, artist and founder of Dorkbot

Takeaways: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s thoughts from Lift
“NKM“, 35, is Minister of State to the Prime Minister, with responsibility for Forward Planning and Development of the Digital Economy. Known as an activist for sustainable development, she was minister in charge of Ecology between 2007 and 2009.

Video: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s takeaways (FR) [43:52]

Changing the Planet (1)- Sustainable development, the Way of Desire
What if global warming and the exhaustion of natural resources were in fact, initially, design problems? How do we move from bad, unsustainable design to a design – of goods, services, systems – that is sensitive and sustainable, durable and beautiful, sensible and profitable? Could we build sustainable growth on desire as well as reason, on creativity as well as regulation? Short answer: Yes!
Keynote: Dennis Pamlin, WWF, author of “Sustainability @ the Speed of Light”
They do it for real: John Thackara (Doors of Perception) and Elizabeth Goodman (designer, confectious.net)

Video: Dennis Pamlin: Changing the Planet [23:50]
Dennis Pamlin, who is Global Policy Advisor for the WWF, introduces the ecological challenges we face and contrast them with most of the technological progresses. His talk delineates a set of filters to understand how to judge innovation on conjunction with the long-term consequences they might have on the planet.

Video: John Thackara: Changing the Planet [23:14]
John Thackara, who is director of Doors of Perception, gives a provocative talk about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as “future” or “sustainable” as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in. He makes the important point that the resources to be put in place already exist and that they might not necessitates complex technological developments.

Changing the Planet (2) – Co-producing and sharing environmental consciousness
Planetary climate change is too large a challenge for each individual. It can quickly become abstract, technical, remote. How can we reconnect individual aspirations, personal and daily choices, to global challenges? How can we all become part of environmental measurement, evaluate and compare the impact of our own activities, become parts of our collective environmental consciousness?
Keynote: Gunter Pauli, ZERI (Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives)
They do it for real: Frank Kresin (Waag Society) and François Jegou (SDS-Solutioning / Sustainable Everyday)

Video: Gunter Pauli: Changing the Planet [55:14]
Gunter Pauli, who founded and directs ZERI, the “Zero Emissions Research Initiative” of the United Nations University in Tokyo, spoke about redesigning manufacturing processes into non-polluting clusters of industries.

Conditional Future
“The best way to predict the future, is to invent it”, said Alan Kay (and Buckminster Fuller). That is only true if as many of us as possible are given the opportunity to discuss, build, experiment and reflect upon their present and their future. Three speakers describe the conditions required to make that possible.
Rob van Kranenburg (Fontys Ambient Intelligence, Council) and Jean-Michel Cornu (Fing)

More videos are being posted to LIFT’s Vimeo, DailyMotion, Blip, Metacafe, Revver and Viddler accounts, so you can choose the platform you like.

In her critical contribution ‘The rise of the sensor citizen – community mapping projects and locative media‘, she takes a close look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.

“Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.”

Anne Galloway (site | blog) recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved conducting an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies. She is interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, and her current research explores design as a social and cultural activity and asks how social and cultural relations are designed. Galloway’s work has been presented to international audiences in technology, design, art, architecture, social and cultural studies, as well as published in a variety of books and journals. She currently teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

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New work
Work isn’t what it used to be. Across the UK, a significant portion of the workforce does not have a traditional nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday job. Around 13% of working people work for themselves and many more work in very small or micro businesses employing one to five people, where factors like location and working hours can be very different from working in a large corporation.
In the North East, 88% of working people are employed by micro businesses. Those who took part in the New Work project during Dott07 agreed that new ways of working offer new opportunities, but also bring new problems.

Our new school
In 2007 Walker Technology College in Newcastle received £13m funding from the government’s £70bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to renovate its buildings. Headteacher Steve Gater knows how big an opportunity this is. ‘The last thing we want to have with our BSF project is a new old school,’ he says. He wants a school that helps the 1,200 pupils get the most out of learning and fits into the community. That’s where designers at Dott 07 came in.

Move me
Growing emphasis is being put on cutting pollution in the UK by reducing our use of transport. But millions of us still need to move by car, bus or train each day. In the village of Scremerston in Northumberland, getting around was problematic. Many villagers don’t own cars or faced a lack of regular and affordable public transport to get them to school, work or hospital appointments.

Low Carb Lane
As part of Dott 07 designers wanted to tackle domestic energy consumption. So a design team set themselves the aim of reducing the energy consumption of one house in Castle Terrace, Ashington, by 60%.

Exploding Media: Exploding Story
This is the story of the extraordinary transformation of Media from all the creative and technological aspects… From traditional storytelling to the impact of gaming on education; from city interaction and augmented reality to the Metaverse, this narrative will feature all the latest innovations that the media industry is going through. We will also introduce creative geniuses pushing the envelope on these new developments, and their impact on personal creativity, brand marketing, learning and entertainment.

The Next Economy: Social, Sustainable, Creative
The attention economy, the experience economy, the sharing economy, the local economy… The economy is currently top of mind in every discussion. What emerging business models can we explore? Can print media be saved? How can communities create local currencies or micro-economies to create sustainable abundance? What is the future of money?

Life in Motion: Finding the Magic in Mobile
Mobile phones are the most personal devices in our lives. In certain parts of the world, mobile is the only media and mobile internet is the only internet. PICNIC ‘09 will give mobile the attention it deserves. We will explore mobile lifestyles around the world, look at how creative brand managers are using mobile to establish brand loyalty and showcase the most innovative mobile applications.

Ezio’s talk outlined an exit strategy for conscious designers, a shift from making things to designing tools for a better society.

For those of us who have signed on to the green revolution, who commit to having the conversation with clients, sourcing better materials, reducing life cycle impacts, doing the hard work of greener design, we need an exit strategy. How do we stop making things less bad and start actually solving for climate change?

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“In order to understand what users need and want from their next mobile device, we need to get in the field and ask, as some mobile manufacturers do. Anthropology, with its human-centered approach to research, has become quite a trendy discipline in the mobile world, particularly when it’s done in exotic emerging markets.

The irony of this approach is that, perhaps for the first time, the needs of the consumer in the developing world are beginning to drive innovation and thinking at home. With concerns about global warming, energy dependence and the environment rising up the political agenda, mobile manufacturers find themselves tackling the very same problems as they design for the developing world. These markets by their very nature demand greener, recyclable, longer-lasting, energy-efficient mobile phones. Today technology transfer works both ways, and it’s increasingly heading in our direction.”

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The concept, he says, “is to bring together problem owners, contributors who can help with a mobile solution and activators who can deploy the solution on the ground.”

The community site, which currently mainly pulls in content from MobileActive, compliments the soon to be launched Betavine Social Exchange, a project funded as part of the Vodafone Group Social Investment Fund, which seeks to enable access to communications in emerging markets, and a mobile for social change forum.

It’s the first in a series whose aim is “to stimulate thought and debate about…radical solutions to real-world challenges”. The intended readers are regional economic development professionals and policy makers.

“Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional carers, tackle extreme weather events in the future and keep services running,” Curtis says. “They also need to understand from the people receiving those services what’s important to them and that’s where the social science perspective comes in – really being able to interpret events and problems from different social perspectives.

“The social science perspective isn’t just about individual behaviour, but helps us to think about the way that people work and interact together. I would argue that what’s important to people and how they tackle problems is not just down to individual characteristics but also to the social circumstances they’re in.”

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(via Nick Marsh)

Recognising the need and opportunity to improve sustainable building practices, the City of Helsinki and Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund are organising a sustainable design competition (rather than just an architecture competition) for a major urban development project.

Called Low2No (implying “low to no carbon emissions”), the competition’s goal is to attract and identify the best teams to design a large mixed-use building complex on a reclaimed harbour at the western edge of Helsinki’s central business district, that would through its exemplary nature set out a sustainable development framework applicable to other contexts.

Despite the short application time frame, a total of 73 applications were submitted. Last week, five teams were selected from a very competitive pool of proposals to proceed to the design phase of the competition.

One of the shortlisted teams is led by the global design and engineering firm Arup, in partnership with the international architecture and urban planning agency Sauerbruch Hutton, and Experientia, the experience design company that this blog is part of.

Arup is highly regarded for its many top-level projects, but also for its philosophy and culture of engineering – and in our field for the many important contributions by Dan Hill at conferences and on his famous cityofsound blog, whereas Sauerbruch Hutton is well-known for the design of the German Federal Environment Agency.

Needless to say that we are very proud to be in such excellent company, and to be the only experience design consultancy in the shortlist.

The five teams are now working on the development of “a design strategy and approach suitable to the challenge, a framework for developing an indicator of sustainability suitable to the challenge, and a vision for the project that will inspire stakeholders to overcome the challenges of systemic change”.

The jury “will be instructed to evaluate the proposals based on evidence of systemic thinking. More than a design, we are look-
ing for a credible strategic framework for change, and the principals upon which the framework was built.”

Experientia will be taking a human-centred angle in its partnership with Arup and Sauerbruch Hutton, emphasising the fundamental impact that people’s behaviours can have on sustainability. Although we cannot disclose too much (the competition is still going on), we will surely be exploring a full plethora of research and design approaches, from ethnographic research to interaction design, and from service design to strategic communications. It will definitely be a great challenge for us to test and prove the fundamental role of a human-centred perspective in this pivotal project.

The four papers are all in the proceedings, but (except for the first one) you will need an ACM membership to download them.

The Heterogenous Home
* Ryan Aipperspach, University of California, Berkeley
* Ben Hooker, Intel Research Berkley
* Allison Woodruff, Intel Research Berkeley
Due to several recent trends, the domestic environment has become more homogeneous and undifferentiated. Drawing on concepts from environmental psychology, we critique these trends. We propose heterogeneity as a new framework for domestic design, and we present design sketches that illustrate how ubiquitous computing technologies can interact with the domestic environment to create a more varied and restorative environment. This work speaks to a number of core issues in ubiquitous computing, such as how the increased presence of devices impacts quality of life, the desirability or undesirability of ubiquitous temporal and spatial availability of devices, and the advantages and disadvantages of device convergence (”"all-in-one”" devices) versus device proliferation (single application devices).

Plastic: A Metaphor for Integrated Technologies
* Tye Rattenbury, People and Practices Research Group
* Dawn Nafus, People and Practices Research Group
* Ken Anderson, People and Practices Research Group
Ubiquitous computing research has recently focused on ‘busyness’ in American households. While these projects have generated important insights into coordination and communication, we think they overlook the more spontaneous and opportunistic activities that surround and support the scheduled ones. Using data from our mixed-methods study of notebook and ultra-mobile PC use, we argue for a different perspective based on a metaphor of ‘plastic’. ‘Plastic’ captures the way technologies, specifically computers, have integrated into the heterogeneous rhythms of daily life. Plastic technologies harmonize with and support daily life by filling opportunistic gaps, shrinking and expanding until interrupted, not demanding conscious coordination, supporting multitasking, and by deferring to external contingencies.

Getting to Green: Understanding Resource Consumption in the Home
* Marshini Chetty, Georgia Institute of Technology
* David Tran, Georgia Institute of Technology
* Rebecca E. Grinter, Georgia Institute of Technology
Rising global energy demands, increasing costs and limited natural resources mean that householders are more conscious about managing their domestic resource consumption. Yet, the question of what tools Ubicomp researchers can create for residential resource management remains open. To begin to address this omission, we present a qualitative study of 15 households and their current management practices around the water, electricity and natural gas systems in the home. We find that in-the-moment resource consumption is mostly invisible to householders and that they desire more real-time information to help them save money, keep their homes comfortable and be environmentally friendly. Designing for domestic sustainability therefore turns on improving the visibility of resource production and consumption costs as well as supporting both individuals and collectives in behavior change. Domestic sustainability also highlights the caveat of potentially creating a green divide by making resource management available only to those who can afford the technologies to support being green. Finally, we suggest that the Ubicomp community can contribute to the domestic and broader sustainability agenda by incorporating green values in designs and highlight the challenge of collecting data on being green.

Designing Sociable IT for Public Use
* Steinar Kristoffersen, Østfold University College
* Ingunn Bratteberg, Mamut ASA
Service providers increasingly use self-service systems, such as kiosk and automata that offer faster and more flexible service. Most of us are familiar with appliances for buying and validating tickets, purchasing soft drinks or getting the newspaper. We book tables in restaurants and hire cars using hotel lobby kiosks. Unfortunately, many such systems confuse and annoy their users. Thus, information technology design for the public space poses distinct challenges. Yet, it is relatively unmapped within our field. Based on an ethnographic study of the purchase and validation of ticketless travel for an airport train, this paper shows how such systems need an extended framework of usability principles, which goes beyond well-known interaction design guidelines.

One of the projects involves the analysis of exploratory user research on a Prepaid Economy Project – seeking to understand how those who live on irregular and unpredictable incomes manage their household finances.

A short summary of our early findings is posted here:

“Broadly speaking, we saw far more sophisticated cash flow management than has either been expected or assumed by those who live on “irregular and unpredictable” incomes. In fact, one future task is to parse out whether the terms “irregular and unpredictable” can even be applied – at this moment, it seems as though it would be far more accurate to say that they do not manage on a ‘fixed amount arriving on a predicted day/date’ i.e. a salary. The second element to be reconsidered is whether those at the “BoP” especially in rural communities can even be accurately called the “poor” – living on $2 a day is one thing, but quite another when much of the hyperlocal economy may not even be based on actual cash.

Cash flow and working capital is managed by manipulating a combination of elements such as experience – a farmer can look at his fields and guesstimate the next harvest’s yield and approximate timing; social capital in the community – whom to lend, borrow from or do ‘business with’; spreading risk across multiple sources of income and finally, the control over two key elements – time: as in periodicity and frequency and money: as in amount and also “form” (is it cash or a good?).

The aim of all of this complex maneuvering is essentially to increase the ability to plan AND decrease the variance between Income and outgoings.”

Also on the project blog are posts on:
- Some thoughts on community based models for sharing costs
- Identifying factors that could improve the success of business models meant for the BoP
- User profiles documented from field trips to The Philippines and India
- Interviews submitted remotely from Malawi

Apparently, Niti told us, Helsinki has ambitious of becoming a knowledge centre on Bottom of the Pyramid issues, and more research can surely be expected, most likely involving also the new Alvar Aalto University through its brand new Design Factory.

“We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.”

Thank you Bruce.

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“Persuasion is a science; newborn and inexact, but a science nonetheless. Advertisers and marketers know this; designers should, too. Persuasive design is not marketing or advertising, it is crafting a product’s user experience so that the user’s actual interaction with the product changes their behavior.

Fogg has isolated over a dozen principles of persuasion, and grouped them into three main avenues: tools, media, and social actors. Each of them apply more to some kinds of products than others would, and since he is primarily a computer scientist, they are weighted heavily towards software and electronics. We need more physical-product designers in this field. Here are most of the strategies, in a nutshell (at least as I interpret them).”

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A review of the past decade of human-computer interaction relating to environmental issues identifies three discourses whose commitments and assumptions have consequences for the design of new interfaces and interactive systems: sustainable interaction design, re-visioning consumption and citizen sensing. It suggests two promising directions for future research: participatory design and infrastructure.

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