WattVision Features Expand Home Energy Monitoring

No electrician, access to real-time home energy data via web or cell, and ability to share data through social networking: the top most desireable features I've heard from participants in previous studies (Intel, Department of Energy) on home energy usage are all there. Looking forward to seeing how this device fares in the growing home energy monitoring space (Wattson, T.E.D., Kill-a-watt, Lifinity, etc.). It would seem that a leader is destined to emerge—likely one that has collaborated closely with a power provider.

Check out the video about WattVision. The quality leaves a little to be desired, but it does a decent job of clearly explaining the features:

PlaneStupid

Anyone who's ever calculated their carbon footprint before knows that flying can really wreck the whole deal. Frustrating.

planestupid.com is doing something about it, and like similar efforts, they're making good use of visualizing the impact:

Polar Bear from Plane Stupid on Vimeo.

Others are working on this problem too. Virtual conferences and video chat are displacing carbon by cutting down on flights - although they have their drawbacks. And United Airlines Charity Miles program will let you donate miles to Conservation International (among other charities). Although, I wonder if the folks over at planestupid might come up with some sort of 'shame miles' subversive campaign. Blood-soaked red carpet premier boarding anyone?

Friction at the Border: Urban Growth Boundaries

Portland Metro stood it's ground last month, and decided not to expand the city's urban growth boundary.

Engaging Play

Gabe Trionfi works with the concept of engaging Play as a design 'tool.' Check out his latest thinking about applying it to climate change:

Free Ride from IDEO on Vimeo.

Living Climate Change

Our Invitation To You from IDEO on Vimeo.

Some friends over at IDEO are compiling ideas for applying design thinking to climate change. Check it out here.

Designing for a Sustainable Future

Some friends from Jump and the Human-Computer Interaction Design program of the School of Informatics at Indiana University (as well as others: organizers) are hosting a workshop at the Creativity and Cognition Conference October 27th in Berkeley.

Here's the scoop:

DESIGNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE is a day devoted to applying sustainable design ideas to software initiatives. Our initial focus will be on the areas of research, synthesis, experience design, and interaction design, but participants will take the conversation from there to formulate something truly inspiring and practical.

We welcome participants from industry, government, and education who are involved with strategy, planning, ideation, ethnography, synthesis, design, construction, and collaboration, whether in theory or in practice.

Future of Fish

Some really exciting work is taking place over at Central, where they're working on developing new ways to encourage sustainable fishing practices.

A bit here on how they integrated ethnographic research (my role in the project). Lots of resources and tools to download on the site as well.

Reburbia

PHOTO BY ALEX MACLEAN

Deadline approaching for this design competition focusing on re-inventing the suburbs. I'm hoping for some really interesting results, especially from the scores of architects waiting out the recession.

What I think a lot of these suburb re-invention efforts miss — as forward-thinking as they are — is a serious consideration of the culture of suburbs. We're now at a point where generations have lived their entire lives in the suburbs, thereby shaping the worldview and social relationship to landscape for millions. Why would we assume this can be 'un-done?' I'd be interested in seeing how architects might play on the bits of resistance (suburban farming trends) and absurdity (a 'new' 7-11 built in the parking lot of an abandoned 7-11) that crop up in the suburbs, and leverage those as cues for re-inventing the suburban cultural landscape from the ground up.

From the site:

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com are pleased to announce the first ever Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs.

With the current housing crisis, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, and rising energy costs, the future of suburbia looks bleak. Suburban communities in central California, Arizona and Florida are desolate and decaying, with for sale and foreclosure signs dotting many lawns. According to the US Census, about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurred in suburban communities in the last ten years. Urbanites who loathe the freeways, big box stores and bland aesthetics stereotypical of suburbia may secretly root for the end of sprawl, but demographic trends indicate that exurban growth is still on the rise.

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:

Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!

More informed feel less personally responsible for global warming

Interesting results from a recent study.

Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global
warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the
subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate. And yet
previous studies of the mass public's subjective assessments of the
risks of global warming and climate change have not sufficiently
examined public informedness, public confidence in climate scientists,
and the role of personal efficacy in affecting global warming
outcomes. By examining the results of a survey on an original and
representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—
informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are
related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant
influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In
particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally
responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global
warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected
effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less
responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global
warming. These results have substantial implications for the
interaction between scientists and the public in general, and for the
public discussion of global warming and climate change in particular.

Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward
Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States
Kellstedt, P.M., Zahran, S., and Vedlitz, A. (2008). Personal
Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global
Warming and Climate Change in the United States. Risk Analysis, 28(1),
113

"Ready-Fire-Aim:" Wal-Mart's Latest Move

Wal-Mart unveiled its new Sustainability Index last week, and everyone seems to agree that it's a bold move. According to Joel Makower, the company admits that this is just an attempt to get something rolling, and that they hope the effort will evolve.

Here are the questions they'll be asking of vendors:

Energy and Climate

1. Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions? (Y/N)
2. Have you opted to report your greenhouse gas emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)? (Y/N)
3. What are your total greenhouse gas emissions reported in your most recently completed report? (Enter total metric tons CO2e, e.g. CDP6 Questionnaire, Section 2b – Scope 1 and 2 emissions)
4. Have you set publicly available greenhouse gas reduction targets? If yes, what are those targets? (Enter total metric tons and target date; 2 fields or leave blank)

Material Efficiency

Scores will be automatically calculated based on your participation in the Packaging Scorecard in addition to the following:

5. If measured, please report total amount of solid waste generated from the facilities that produce your product(s) for Wal-Mart Inc for the most recent year measured. (Enter total lbs)
6. Have you set publicly available solid waste reduction targets? If yes, what are those targets? (Enter total lbs and target date; 2 fields or leave blank)
7. If measured, please report total water use from the facilities that produce your product(s) for Wal-Mart Inc for the most recent year measured. (Enter total gallons)
8. Have you set publically available water use reduction targets? If yes, what are those targets? (Enter total gallons and target date; 2 fields or leave blank)

Natural Resources

9. Have you established publicly available sustainability purchasing guidelines for your direct suppliers that address issues such as environmental compliance, employment practices, and product/ingredient safety? (Y/N)
10. Have you obtained 3rd party certifications for any of the products that you sell to Walmart? If so, from the list of certifications below, please select those for which any of your products are, or utilize materials that are, currently certified.

People and Community

11. Do you know the location of 100% of the facilities that produce your product(s)? (Y/N)
12. Before beginning a business relationship with a manufacturing facility, do you evaluate their quality of production and capacity for production? (Y/N)
13. Do you have a process for managing social compliance at the manufacturing level? (Y/N)
14. Do you work with your supply base to resolve issues found during social compliance evaluations and also document specific corrections and improvements? (Y/N)
15. Do you invest in community development activities in the markets you source from and/or operate within? (Y/N)

Some have already shot holes in this plan, accusing Wal-Mart of avoiding key social sustainability issues like labor rights, but Makower points to some promise for Index over time, including a publicly available database:

"Walmart already is talking with Microsoft about creating an open-source database and tools to make information about companies and products accessible; no doubt, for consumers there will eventually be an app for that.

And Walmart has made it clear that they don't want to own this. They want it to live within some credible entity that will continue to develop and deploy the Index. (The company isn't beyond starting its own nonprofit if it isn't able to find one that suits its needs.) And the company is working to bring in other companies -- Best Buy, Costco, Kroger, and Target have been part of the conversation -- to adopt the Index, too, creating even more purchasing power in the marketplace."

What Can Health Care Teach Sustainability?

The problems facing health care are in some ways not dissimilar to those of sustainability. After reading Atul Gawande's recent article titled "The Cost Conundrum" in The New Yorker, it seems that both systems would benefit greatly by incentivizing collaboration and quality over exploitation, resource depletion and profiteering.

The medical models Gawande points to as promising include:

• Enable collectives that reward participants with savings from their actions
• Shift regulatory burdens from individual to group (malpractice, fines, etc.)
• Penalize those who don’t form collaborative collectives

Although getting Congress to cooperate with large shifts in regulatory approach in this way seems daunting for health care due to the huge lobbying interests in the game, these strategies might actually prove to be more realistic in environmental regulation, where players (NGO's, energy companies, etc.) are increasingly witnessing the benefits of cooperative action. These strategies would need to sit comfortably alongside traditional enforcement approaches, but incentivizing cooperative models would seem to go much further than protectionism has taken us. These solutions would also need to go beyond cap and trade models (which continue to privilege individualistic behaviors), and into areas of shared liability and tangible penalties for not collaborating.

Taco Bell's New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

Sustainability Across Cultures

How do we develop solutions that enable sustainable behaviors and practices when perceptions of the environment are as diverse as the cultures that hold them? We might begin by looking for common themes across cultures that have both deep resonance and the potential to be leveraged as triggers for behavioral change. Consider:

The western world’s understanding of environmentalism is tied closely to the science of ecology and it's development, as well as the biocentric activism of the counter-culture movement. In this version of environmentalism, saving endangered species and preserving the integrity of their ecosystems were the original rallying cries. Running parallel to these actions were a range of liberationist movements and the growth of interest in ‘natural’ foods and 'Eastern' spiritualities.

In the two countries that now host the world’s most rapidly expanding economies (India and China), what we might identify as environmental sentiments are linked closely to a history of spirituality that prioritizes the protection or purification of the body. A common theme found in these cultures is the growing awareness of—and dissatisfaction with—pollutants, paired with a distinct lack of trust in their own governments’ ability to regulate industry and protect the environment.

In Brazil (as well as many other Latin American countries), environmentalism is often tied to social justice movements and efforts to eradicate rural poverty and hunger. This is because perceptions of the environment there have been influenced heavily by U.S. and European NGO campaigns launched in the mid 20th century. The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and other NGO’s forged a “Green Revolution” to eradicate hunger in South America and India which manifested most commonly in efforts to maximize crop yields via extensive use of pesticides and herbicides. The success of these hunger eradication campaigns were also repsonsible for creating new cultural notions of the earth as a pliable provider that can be easily and quickly manipulated to provide for human needs. The campaigns also linked the "Green Revolution" to civil obligations and responsible national citizenship.

This is cursory review, of course. However, I believe a more in-depth consideration is likely to reveal that the most common cross-cultural associations with environmentalism would include concern about personal health and the well-being of future generations (particularly one's own children). Overall, I see the most promise for global sustainable design that hones in on—and leverages culturally-situated understandings of—embodiment, protection, and a locally-rooted sense of ethics.

Sketch Notes: Hackers as Healers

A few months after presenting at the Exposed Design Research Exchange at ASU, I ran across Rhinman's sketch notes on Flickr. Cool stuff, and such an interesting peek into how another person perceives and interprets what you're saying. I'd be fun to do this on a larger scale (workshop exercise?).

Green Humor

Environmentalism is historically quite sullen…cranky even. Doomsday messaging may motivate some (especially those already committed to the cause), but for sustainable behaviors, products and practices to become truly widespread, we need a more diverse palate of strategies.

Now that we seem to have nearly universal scientific consensus around global climate change, the lectures, pie charts, and computer models have lost their punch. We need approaches that embrace and trigger humor, spontaneity, exploration, and levity. This means that now, more than ever, the role of experience, narrative, and empathy are critical to sustainable design; as are some of the ‘classic’ components of comedy, such as irreverence, conflict, mistaken identity, etc.

Is this possible? Or is 'green' humor just another form of preaching to the choir?

There's this from Do the Green Thing. And this from Epuron. I'd be interested in other examples people might offer...

Eco-Chic and 'Trickle-Down' Environmentalism

Remember Reaganomics?: The theory that economic growth will 'naturally' flow from upper socio-economic tiers to lower ones if given the opportunity (e.g., tax cuts for the wealthy). The idea is obviously out of fashion in our current political and economic climate, but trickle-down as a broader concept doesn't seem to have lost its allure.

Few would argue with the fact that liberals traditionally make up the bulk of environmentalists. But global climate change has created a more recent sense of urgency to engage and motivate far greater numbers (and types) of people to behave sustainably. The tactics vary, but some bear and odd resemblance to Reagan's 'trickle down' assumptions. Most notable is the 'eco-chic' movement, which operates under the assumption that the eco-elite will lead the masses to a more sustainable world by making green trendy, chic, or cool—often through the purchase of more consumer goods. It seems an odd contradiction that environmental leftists of the upper-middle class variety, who would most definitively reject Reagan-esque trickle down economics, would embrace an approach to environmentalism that assumes the same basic relationship between status quo soical hierarchies—a rather conservative approach.

The real problem, however, is not the inherent conservativism of eco-chic, or the transient nature of its focus on fashion and trends (as some argue). The more critical issue is that this approach assumes a primacy of the flow in social trends from the upper to lower classes, and that it is both possible and preferrable to exploit this flow as a catalyst for creating sustainable behaviors.

Let's address the primacy issue first. While it may be the case that social trends have historically flowed from upper to lower classes, a very convincing case can be made for the recent disintegration of this phenomenon. Social network theorists point to a growing number of new flows of influence, most of which are facilitated by our increasingly networked existences. Today, more than ever, we are looking to 'others like me' for cues on social values and related actions. The runaway popularity of reality television, social networking sites, and the evolution of news from a tradition of objective journalism to channels for the confirmation of pre-formed values are all signs of this.

As for whether or not it is preferrable or possible to exploit the presumed flow of social influence from upper to lower classes, a great deal of evidence from my own ethnographic research demonstrates that this path of presumed influence is largely irrelevant for the majority of U.S. population, at least in terms of impact on their actual behaviors. Instead, we are beginning to understand the diverse constellation of motivations that lead people to behave sustainably. Although this diversity is disconcerting for market researchers (who’ve spent lifetimes tying purchasing trends to demographic categories), the good news is that a diversity of motivations means there are more and more points of alliance that can potentially drive sustainable behaviors. Whether it’s Christian evangelical leanings, a nationalist passion for decreasing reliance on foreign oil, or keeping a healthy home for your children, behaving sustainably can mean many different things to different people.

What’s more, many people use different standards to evaluate ‘greeness.' They make changes in a piecemeal fashion, and prioritize according to personal considerations of budget, ethical stance, political position, health conditions, etc. What we know now is that, in terms of sustainable behavior, inconsistency is the new norm. Incrementalism and networking have displaced the green revolution of the counter culture variety.

In this environment, the question becomes: how can we design in ways that accommodate these disparate value sets and priorities while simultaneously facilitating green behaviors—all without being pedantic. A challenge, of course. But it's pretty clear that eco-chic crowd and trickle-down environmentalists have lost the momentum they convinced themselves they were gaining (c.f., Hip and Zen to Close).

What Can Sustainability Teach Health Care?

I've been asking myself this question for a while. It seems somewhat obvious that concepts like life-cycle analysis and holistic or systemic thinking would go a long way toward breaking down overly-siloed health care.

For example, we might ask: What sorts of environmental or cultural processes or systems might be used as metaphors for healing or organization change in health care? How might biomimicry be used to improve medical records systems, patient processing, or the waiting room experience? Might practices and approaches prevalent in environmental remediation have a place in patient recovery? Indeed, innovation is now a top priority for all major health care providers in the U.S., so the opportunities for asking these kinds of questions are expanding.

But the other day a grad-school friend, Charlie Scull, forwarded this article to me, which describes how Natalie Jeremijenko at NYU is reversing this flow of knowledge by taking the familiarity of the doctor's visit and using it as a metaphor for prescribing behavioral changes that impact the environment. It's a fascinating reversal, and one that can open new platforms for thinking between the two areas of research and action.

See Jeremijenko's web site here.

Re-Imagining Cities after the Age of OIl

While visiting the Rockefeller Foundation page, I came across an intriguing exhibit that will be traveling the country soon. Pics here.

From the site:
Held from November 6 to 8, 2008, this ground–breaking symposium was organized to address the role of urban design in the face of one of the most profound and important challenges facing global society: the need to re–imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without the plentiful and abundant oil upon which prosperous urban economies have been built.

The "Re–Imagining Cities" program spoke to the depth and diversity of the challenge with sessions on innovations in the way cities are conceived, adapted, designed, developed, and managed in a post–carbon world. The conference concluded with a manifesto on educating the next generation of urban designers and how best to equip them for the road ahead.

An accompanying exhibition showcased innovative ideas, projects, initiatives, and policies from around the world that seek to reduce emissions by changing the way we inhabit cities. Documenting the rise in oil dependency, changing development patterns, and demographic trends, the exhibition threaded prescient theories and artifacts surrounding the 1958 conference with contemporary challenges of the urban design profession. The exhibition will be on display in other locations in the coming months. Check back for future locations.

The Century of the Self - Episode 1 (1/6)

Given our current economic situation, it seems appropriate to look back at the construction of consumption as we know it.

The Story of Stuff - Ch.5: Consumption