We would like to take this opportunity to solicit comments and critiques. This
paper was intended first and foremost to be part of a conversation, and we
believe that some of that conversation should happen here on the sustainable-chi
list. We hope that members of the general HCI community will join us in this
discussion.
~Eric and Six
Thank you for initiating this conversation. I agree that there are many circumstances where new technology is not the solution, and where the framing of "problems" and "solutions" isn't the most productive way forward.
I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on the framing of "design as an intervention in a complex situation." If metrics "cannot
fully capture the complexities of environmental sustainability" (which I agree with), how might one get a sense for whether an intervention is making the situation more or less sustainable? You point to some examples of simplifications proving invalid, but there are many simplifications that do provide viable means of understanding the world of which we are a part.
The topic of indirect effects, while you allude to in your paper, is particularly relevant to this discussion. Six and I, along with Jim White, recently published a column in IEEE Computer about how indirect effects call into question the often-assumed correlation between efficiency and sustainability in IT systems.
http://wtf.tw/text/more_efficiently_unsustainable.pdf
Understanding these indirect effects, at least to some degree, is critical to assessing the value of an intervention. And, if we do not have the cognitive apparatus to comprehend these indirect effects to a sufficient degree of accuracy (and I argued in my book Greening through IT that we do not), then this may well be a place for IT to be deployed effectively. These IT interventions, however, are likely to have applications that run strongly counter to sustainability as well, so it ultimately returns to being a question about the human aspects of these situations. This matches the point Toyama makes about ICT4D in his article in The Atlantic - "Our successes were due more to effective partners, and less to our technology."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/technology-is-not-the-answer/73065/
(Disclaimer: I first learned about this article from Six, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it matches with this paper. :) )
There are also some interesting implications of this paper for the boundaries between academic disciplines. Right now, it seems like a better strategy for success in academia to have depth in one area, rather than breadth across many. A person with 20 papers in the top conference or journal in a field will likely have a whole community at his/her back when it comes time for tenure, ready to write letters that say "wow, fantastic scholar, yes, tenure." A person with one paper in equivalent venues in 20 different fields, though, won't have the same coherent community to speak on his/her behalf. You quote, in your paper, that “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”. I might argue that, if you're in the Department of Hammers, that's not necessarily a bad strategy for personal success. So then perhaps we need to think about how to support holistic approaches in academia (if, in fact, academia is where we expect prosocial interventions in complex situations to arise). (But this, I know, gets into other thorny terrain that is often debated at CHI and elsewhere.) Thoughts on these topics would be welcome as well.
Best,
Bill
P.S. The idea of "technological extravention" reminds me of Amory Lovins' (2003) concept of "negatechnologies". He offered that "we tend to discuss only deploying better new technologies. Equally important is getting bad existing technologies out of use.”
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sustainable CHI" group.
> To post to this group, send email to sustain...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sustainable-c...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sustainable-chi?hl=en.
---
Bill Tomlinson
Associate Professor of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt
w...@uci.edu
Thanks for your thorough and thoughtful comments. I want to take a moment to
comment on the question of metrics.
Some of the points you make were also raised during a question after the paper
presentation at CHI. We are not trying to say that metrics are completely
useless. However, any metric (for sustainability or most anything else)
necessarily abstracts away from certain details of the situation to focus on
others. The point is to attend to what's lost in that process of abstraction. As
the citation in the paper to Seeing Like a State suggests, this is not an
entirely new argument, but it seems highly applicable in the context of
sustainable HCI.
I'm also intrigued by your question of how to determine "whether an intervention
is making the situation more or less sustainable." The notion that a situation
can be more or less sustainable perhaps implies, or is predicated on, the
assumption that sustainability is something that can in fact be quantified as
such (hence in part the interest in metrics). This draws attention to two
important points.
First, what is sustainable? Or, perhaps, what is sustainability? As Six has
previously argued, sustainable HCI on the whole seems to be doing a significant
amount work to help, or to make, users be more sustainable without having in
depth discussions about what it actually means to be sustainable, or about what
exactly is to be sustained. Perhaps a conversation about metrics for
sustainability would help foreground this gap, but I'm still not convinced that
better metrics are what we need.
This brings me to my second point. We should not be focused solely on metrics
for sustainability because sustainability is not solely a technical or a
scientific category that needs measuring. It is also a social and a cultural
category. Woodruff et al.'s CHI 2008 paper provides some illustrative examples
of how sustainability as a cultural category is made manifest. There was also
some intriguing work discussed at the workshop on Everyday Practice and
Sustainable HCI this year at CHI that does a good job of foregrounding the
sociocultural dimensions of sustainability, and how people create and enact
sustainability as a cultural category. An emphasis on metrics and simplification
draws attention away from these complex social and cultural dynamics. Attending
to such social and cultural dynamics may provide an alternative,
non-metric-based approach to thinking about the ways in which a particular
situation may be more or less (un)sustainable.
~Eric
Some notes I took from book:
Xxiii
"A sad truth is that almost every solution designed today, even the
most 'sustainable' one, has more of a negative impact on the planet
than a positive one. This means that the world would be better off if
most of what was designed was never produced. This is changing and it
doesn’t have to be the case in the future, but we have a long way to
go in order to change this pattern."