Adaptive Path Blog

This past January, Peter Merholz was talking with Allan Chochinov from Core77 about whether Adaptive Path was interested in joining a new movement around design and sustainability. Peter then asked the Adaptive Path staff if they thought it made sense for our company, that mostly traffics in bits and pixels, to credibly support green causes. This received little response. I think this was because we hadn’t quite decided, as a company, what being green meant. Sure we cared about the environment: about half of us take transit to work, about a quarter bike, a fairly stingy amount of us (six) drive. Thanks to Robert, our Office Manager, we have instituted an office composting program, we use 100% recycled paper, and so on. We have good intentions, but are we green?

It was at this time that Valerie Casey contacted Adaptive Path about joining the Designers Accord. From their web site:

“The Designers Accord envisions a creative community where the principles of sustainable design are seamlessly integrated into all practice and production.

“Our mission is to catalyze innovation throughout the creative community by collectively building our environmental intelligence. For this cause, we advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage pooling knowledge so that all may benefit and build on marketable and sustainable solutions. We believe this will lead to greater innovation.
“Our approach for accelerating adoption of sustainability principles in the creative community by:

• Providing a productive public and private way for designers to take action
• Asking all adopters to engage in the conversation about social and environmental impact with every client and customer, and integrate sustainable alternatives in their work
• Creating a global community of peers who openly share passion and ideas around environmental and social innovation
• Building a knowledge-sharing network to share best practices, design methods, resources, and tools through an online platform
• Educating ourselves and the public about the environmental impact of consumption”

Adaptive Path had a spirited discussion about the Designers Accord and what it could mean to our company and our design practices. Did we have the authority to discuss sustainability with our clients? We are champions of good experience design, what would happen if we also raised the banner of sustainability? What would we do if the goals of sustainable design conflicted with good experience design? These were important questions and my colleague, Alexa, blogged it. Nevertheless, with overwhelming support we decided to sign-on to the Accord.

Signing on the the Designers Accord kick started some other initiatives that had been plodding slowly in the background, namely off-setting Adaptive Path’s carbon footprint. But the Designers Accord asks for much more. It asks us to include carbon off-setting language into our contracts with our clients, it asks us to lower our carbon footprint each year, and it asks that we consider how design can produce a more sustainable world.

So is Adaptive Path now an environmental company?

No. We are still driven to help companies create products and services that deliver great experiences that improve people’s lives. But now what we are also looking at design problems through a green lens to see how consideration for the environment affect our solutions. Our consideration for the environment will never supersede our passion for good experience design but it has the potential of promoting secondary design considerations and giving additional heft to arguments for features or capabilities.

I am pleased to announce today, which is Earth Day, that we have not only off-set the 454,455.6 lbs. or roughly 228 tons of carbon generated by our operations and consulting in 2007, but that our Managing Experience 2008 San Francisco conference is our first event that is carbon neutral.

Which brings us back to the original question Allan Chochinov posed to Peter last January, is Adaptive Path green? I would reply not yet, but we are looking forward to learning how to be.

If your interested in learning more about the methodology we used to identify and off-set our carbon footprint you can email me.

Here are some good resources in the meantime:
http://www.designersaccord.org
http://www.carbonfund.org
http://www.treesftf.org

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Elaine Huang of Motorola Labs presented my favorite paper at CHI so far — Breaking down the Disposable Technology Paradigm for Sustainable Interaction Design for Mobile Phones. She vividly illustrated the built in life cycle of mobile devices by walking the audience through a scenario where a user bought a new phone whenever their contract with a carrier expired or a new stylish phone was released. One of the research participants from Elaine’s research study said it best, “I didn’t really want a new phone, but I got one anyway.”

Why are we disposing mobile phones so quickly? Elaine pointed out this is a growing sentiment around all personal electronic devices, not just phones. She referenced the work of Mark Weisser, whose research supports the idea that that devices that don’t have a strong sense of ownership get left around.

The result:

A disposable culture around mobile phones
We perceive mobile phones (as well as many personal consumer electronic devices) as disposable and don’t understand the impact of our decisions on the environment.

We don’t know how to dispose of mobile phones
We know what to do with a car when we are done with it (sell it), but we don’t know what to do with a mobile device. Most of the participants in Elaine’s study kept their old phones — some with as many as five.

426,000 mobile phones are decommissioned daily in the United States, which is a truly astonishing number. Elaine shared some interesting design ideas for both helping users understand how to dispose of their phones and designing phones to be more reconfigurable so that users would keep their mobile devices longer.

Elaine added that mobile business models reinforce this disposable perception.

The real challenge is business reform. Volume allows mobile handset manufacturers and carriers to remain profitable. While horrible for the environment, the built-in replacement life cycle drives handset sales. Although almost all handset manufacturers are making moves to be more reliant on software and services for profit, whether or not those strategies will lead to profitability remains to be seen.

Elaine believes there is a market for high-quality phones that will last exists, and I certainly think that markets like India reinforce her idea. However, it is clear that business reform and the creation of new business models will be necessary to help solve this problem.

In the meantime, if you are like me and have 1, 2, or even five “decommissioned” mobile phones lying around in drawers at home, here are some ways you can dispose of them:

Contact the Manufacturer
Nokia
Motorola
Samsung
LG
Palm

Re-sell on eBay or Craiglist

Donate
Collective Good
Charity Guide for Donating Mobile phones

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Allison Woodruff of Intel Research presented the findings of an extensive contextual research study of people throughout the US who had made significant changes to their home in order to support a green lifestyle. She noticed most research to date focused on activism so the goal of her study was to understand the daily practices of individuals committed to green living in order to understand how HCI could help promote positive personal behavior. Her presentation contained compelling video clips of participants from the study who relayed the “why” of their daily practices in relationship to their home and their desire to be more green.

Some of her findings were:

Living in a green home is like living on a ship
People in this study developed an immediate and physical relationship with their home. The green friendly homes were like a ships — participants needed to remain aware, make constant minor adjustments in order to maximize efficiency. While at times burdensome, participants in Allison’s study also spoke a kind of fulfillment this consciousness provided.

Continuous Computation
Participants in the study enjoyed the modest mental challenges that result from their lifestyle choice. They felt that green was about being mindful — and engaged. This engagement wasn’t viewed as a burden, but a pleasurable puzzle that engaged their mind.

The Path
Allison spoke of how the participants in her study acknowledged the commitment required to being green — that it was not a single act but a lifelong relationship to change. Their relationship to the lifestyle had grown from an ardent hobby to an organizing principle for their life.

Individualism as a driver
Allison pointed out that the participants expressed a strong drive for uniqueness and a desire to differentiate themselves from the rest of society. These folks were proud and viewed themselves as independent thinkers.

Implications for the HCI community
- Provide people with tools for personal action.
- Provide focus. It’s easy for people to get overwhelmed with all the choices and often recommendations about how to be more green are confusing and/or conflicting. Provide people with the tools to focus on one or two things and provide depth — breadth will grow from a feeling of success.(depth vs. breadth learning)
- Engage people mentally. People like the modest mental challenges that come with the mindfulness of being green.
- Provide people with the tools to debate and decide for themselves. Support the complex decision-making process by helping people understand trade-offs.
- Change the circumstances. Directly target large-scale corporations and government.

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A couple of weeks ago I participated on a panel on Conscious Capitalism at the Commonwealth Club of California. We covered quite a bit of ground in an hour, from how experience design could offset conspicuous consumption to issues like making meaning in the lives of customers, consumer activism, and lifestyle brands.

We had a packed audience for the panel, which I shared with Rajan Dev of Hot Studio, Nathan Shedroff of the Design MBA program at CCA, and Eric Ryan, co-founder of the Method line of green cleaning products. I’d love to tell you more about the discussion, but can do one better, since Fora.tv is now broadcasting their recording of the panel:

Some of the issues we didn’t have time to hit on that I really feel are a part of this discussion on conscious capitalism:

• The design stage for a product or service is worth investing in. It’s when 80-90% of a product’s life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined (Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism), but it’s also the best time to incorporate insights about people and their needs. The design stage is often rushed through to be first-to-market, but that’s rarely that big of an advantage — anyone remember the first MP3 player? (hint: it wasn’t the iPod.)
• People’s attitudes towards consumption are hopefully nearing a change. Individuals in the U.S. consume roughly twice as much as they did 50 years ago, and 99% of what we buy isn’t even in use 6 months later (Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff). But recently there has been a shift in attitude, where some consumers look to buying more services and experiences (e.g., travel, spas, OnStar) as a sign/use of their wealth rather than buying more goods. And while new consumer markets are springing up around the world, many of them can leapfrog bad old systems of production and consumption.
• A 21st Century business will operate (not just talk) differently than the old models. Some qualities I foresee: [1] a strong passion for addressing the needs of a customer over the short- and long-term; profit is a by-product of this passion; [2] a focus on services and experiences; designing, supporting, and continuously improving a total customer relationship; [3] measuring development in means other than just aggregate growth more sales isn’t the sole indicator of a better business.

Big thanks to Kevin O’Malley of TechTalk for hosting a great panel!

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“Is there such a thing as sustainable experience design?” In our internal discussions of The Designers Accord, Jesse posed this question. Not being industrial designers, we generally aren’t qualified to address product life-cycle issues such as materials & processes or transportation logistics in any meaningful way. But, as Jesse suggested, perhaps we can bring a new perspective to the sustainability conversation that other disciplines haven’t yet considered.

Experience is closely tied to sustainable behavior: People act un-sustainably because it’s often much easier or results in a better experience than doing otherwise. (It’s much more convenient and pleasant to drive my car wherever I want.) Thus, experience designers are uniquely-poised to encourage sustainability by capitalizing on what we know about human behavior as well as business strategy. We have the capacity to:

Make sustainable experiences more compelling than the alternatives. How can we make doing what’s best in the long run more attractive in the short run? (e.g., Make transit a better experience than driving.)

Understand and appeal to people’s motivations, values and aspirations. As ethnographers, we know how to tap into the subconscious motivations that unwittingly shape behavior. How can we appeal to these tendencies at points of decision so that right choices become the most natural choices?

Harness the power of information to help people make better decisions. As information designers, we know how to make the abstract concrete and make hidden costs visible, visualize the future, and tell stories. The right information can not only influence decisions when presented at critical moments, it can also shape underlying attitudes and values — a necessary component of lasting change.

Promote a service-mindset vs. a product-mindset. As Liya Zheng put it in her post on Service Design and Sustainability: “Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services.”

Communicate the business value of sustainability. Green sells! Businesses for whom green is central to their identity, value proposition or business strategy are more successful than businesses that adopt a cause just because they ought to. As design strategists, we can help companies find ways to turn sustainability into profitability.

But while it’s easy to identify how we COULD contribute, the tricky part, especially for us as consultants, is finding real opportunities to exercise these skills. While design educators can shape future generations of designers and business-people, and in-house designers can shape their company’s culture and product/service strategy, we’re often brought in for specific, often screen-based projects that seemingly have nothing to do with sustainability.

Does it really make sense, as the Accord calls for, to have a sustainability conversation with every client? How can we avoid coming across as pretentious do-gooders?

What best practices can we promote in our interaction design work (e.g., strive to reduce computer use by promoting more energy-efficient means of information access such as mobile)?

How can we identify clients and projects where the skills outlined above can be applied?

These are the questions we’re left wondering about and debating. If anyone has any thoughts or perspectives, we’d love to hear them.

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As designers and researchers, we’re all part of a very critical point in the production process for goods and services. Not only do we shape how desirable, effective, and usable the result is, but we also influence what materials will go into or support the offerings we design, what process will be used to support them, and the impact the offerings have in the lives of the end users. 80-90% of an offerings life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined during design*, baked into the good or service in a way that’s much harder to change later on.

This Wednesday evening, I’ll join a great panel of speakers at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to discuss Conscious Capitalism: Resolving the conflict between consumerism and progressive innovation. (There should still be room for you to make reservations online.) This is a conversation I’m really interested in diving into with the panelists—addressing how an understanding of humans and sustainable business practices are both requisite for a real 21st century business strategy.

As a warm up to the panel, check out the story of stuff and then come join us at the Commonwealth Club!

*Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism

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(Or, Making Hidden Costs Visible, Continued…)

“Turn off those lights, you’re wasting energy!”

Growing up, I did it cause my dad told me to, and I do it now because I know in the back of my head that running the lights must be costing me. But it’s hard not to be apathetic about it: The costs of household energy consumption, both to my wallet and the environment, are far too invisible to affect immediate decision-making and behavior.

Lucid Design Group recognized that a once-a-month energy bill isn’t enough to change behavior and developed the “Building Dashboard,” a system with a widget-like interface that aims to “translate consumption into everyday units that a non-technical audience can understand — dollars, lightbulbs, carbon dioxide.”

“It is difficult to motivate building occupants to take actions that conserve resources if they cannot easily sense and react to the implications of their decisions.

Research demonstrates that easily accessible feedback on resource use increases both awareness and motivation to act in ways that change attitudes, minimize resource use and save money.

A Building Dashboard™ display provides uniquely interpretable graphics for a non-technical audience and creates opportunities for active learning through feedback that are not otherwise available.”

It’s a great concept. Unfortunately it’s not something that I, the building resident and consumer, could set up and use — it’s something that must be implemented by a green-minded architect or building manager.

Now if only there were more services like this that could make such information available and accessible to the masses. Perhaps the energy companies could provide such a service? What kind of infrastructure does it take to implement designs for widespread behavioral change?

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When it comes to thinking about the true cost of things, ignorance is bliss. People prefer that costs be hidden:

• It feels cheaper to drive to work than to take transit. You see the money leave your pocket for every transit trip. But the annual thousand-dollar insurance bill and depreciation of your car are more easily forgotten.
• It feels better to have taxes invisibly withheld than to write regular checks to the IRS and come face-to-face with the taxes you’re paying.
• It feels better to get “free parking!“ at your apartment or local grocery store than to pay for parking, even if it might mean lower everyday prices.

Now with a little thinking you can calculate the true monetary costs of many things. But environmental and social costs are even more elusive.

Hidden costs lead to a breakdown of capitalism. People are unable to make optimal decisions because they don’t consider the true costs of things. It’s easy to see a price tag, but it is difficult to take into account all of the factors that make up something’s true cost.

How can hidden costs be made visible? An obvious solution is to pass the financial burden on to the consumer.

• Charging for plastic bags (IKEA)
• Transferring the full cost of oil to consumers

Unfortunately, while taking advantage of market forces, these measures also tend to make people grouchy.

Jennie Winhall’s talk at MX on Designing for Social Good has made me think about ways that we, as user experience designers, could use our understanding of psychology and behavior to develop creative and positive solutions that help people see hidden costs and make better decisions. Some examples…

Grouchy experience: Big warning sign featuring fines you’ll receive if you dump toxic waste into a storm drain.
Positive experience: Design storm drains to look like fish. You wouldn’t want to dump junk on a cute fish.

Grouchy experience: A taxi-like money ticker that shows you how much every trip in your car is really costing — in real time!
Positive experience: A taxi-like money ticker that shows you how much you’re saving when you drive more slowly and that turns fuel and money-saving into a game. (”One important reason why hybrid cars result in better mileage is that drivers suddenly have an indication of how various aspects of their driving habits shape mileage.” -Jamaias Cascio)

Other ideas?

But I’ll end with a caveat that experience isn’t everything when it comes to hidden costs. Sometimes facing reality will make us uncomfortable, and that’s not always bad.

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