Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse Eli Blevis School of Informatics, Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana USA [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper presents the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus of interaction design—a perspective that is termed Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). As a starting point for a perspective of sustainability, design is defined as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being. This perspective of sustainability is presented in terms of design values, methods, and reasoning. The paper proposes (i) a rubric for understanding the material effects of particular interaction design cases in terms of forms of use, reuse, and disposal, and (ii) several principles to guide SID. The paper illustrates—with particular examples of design critique for interactive products and appeals to secondary research—how two of these principles may be applied to move the effects of designs from less preferred forms of use to more preferred ones. Finally, a vision for incorporating sustainability into the research and practice of interaction design is described. Author Keywords Sustainability, design, interaction design. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous. J.7. [Computers in other systems]: Consumer products. K.1. [The Computer Industry]: Markets. K.4.m. [Computers and society]: Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION In this paper, I claim that sustainability can and should be a central focus of interaction design—a perspective that I call Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). I propose several aspects of a framing for a research program and methodology germane to this way of thinking about interaction design—a way of thinking that is critical for our collective futures. The vision—design—for this future concerns defining sustainability as a core semantics for interaction design. As a starting point for a perspective of sustainability, I define design as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being, a definition which is inspired by several important design authors—principally by Tony Fry’s [14] notion of defuturing in his book “A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing” and as well by Willis’ [47] notion of ontological designing, which itself owes to Winograd & Flores’ [49] “Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design” as well as to Heidegger’s [18] essay “The Question concerning technology”. Alexander’s [1] recent work on structure-preserving transformations is also an inspiration. This definition of design from the perspective of sustainability serves as a lens through which design values, design methods, and designs themselves may be evaluated, especially 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. In addition to proposing this perspective of sustainability, I propose a rubric for understanding and assessing the material effects induced by particular interaction design cases in terms of forms of use, reuse, and disposal from the perspective of sustainability. The items of the rubric are disposal, salvage, recycling, remanufacturing for reuse, reuse as is, achieving longevity of use, sharing for maximal use, achieving heirloom status, finding wholesome alternatives to use, and active repair of misuse. The important claim is that software and hardware are intimately connected to a cycle of mutual obsolescence with implications for the environmental sustainability and other sustainability effects and modes of use enumerated by the rubric. Several principles can serve as goals for SID of which two are discussed in detail in this paper, namely (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 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA. Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-593-9/07/0004...$5.00. CHI 2007 Proceedings • Design Theory April 28-May 3, 2007 • San Jose, CA, USA503that 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. There are three additional principles that I will describe in less detail here, but which have import for achieving the first two, namely (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