Lately my thinking about sustainability has been shifting toward the ways in which we might best design for enabling sustainable behaviors on a scale larger than green activism or green consumerism.
Although I believe we can’t mandate behavior change through design, I do believe that if we pay very close attention to current behavior patterns that are most likely to show promise for adopting design solutions/interventions that support and encourage values and behaviors best aligned with sustainability, there is some hope for large scale change. As an anthropologist, this is largely a methodological question. For instance, how might the growth of social networking better facilitate systemic thinking? From my previous work, I’ve seen that narrative and personal connections to choices people make (including those that aren’t necessarily green, but can result in sustainably-aligned behaviors) are also promising areas of investigation. And finally, there is a great deal of promise in George Marcus-inspired ‘follow-the-flow’ methods that can help us better understand the spaces between people, material objects, cultural influences, etc. in ways that might identify opportunities to design for systemic thinking.
For me, investigations of social networks, narrative, and the spaces between people, material objects and cultural influences converge interestingly within considerations of cultural landscape as expressed through visual culture. So, I've started another blog. Actually, it's just a place where I'm collecting thoughts on cultural landscape and visual culture. However, I may eventually begin to build some theory on the connections between cultural landscape, visual culture and sustainability there. Check it out if you're interested.
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