SUSTAINABLY OURSImages of sustainable interactions: seeing with the lens of sustainability

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Abstract

images concerned with sustainability and interaction design. In keeping with the new theme of interactions magazine—promoting interactions—it is our hope that these images will stimulate many discussions, actions, and reactions. The subtlety of images is here offered as a complement to the potentially precise, yet oftentimes reductive expression of text. By now issues of sustainability make frequent appearance in the everyday press; most readers of interactions may have accepted the need for acting more sustainably with respect to interaction design, its contexts, and its effects. The big question is what to do differently. The images that follow—some of which are more connected to the context of the effects of interaction design than directly to interaction design itself—are all targeted at fostering a collective way of looking differently at the materials and machinery of unsustainable consumption with an eye toward doing things differently in the future. These images are quite broad in scope, and the relationship between the contexts pictured and interactivity is very broadly interpreted. The images and descriptions that follow are not necessarily solution concepts for more sustainable interactive design, nor are they necessarily observations targeted at raising awareness—awareness is already high. Rather, these images are targeted at stimulating insights about how to use the materials of interactive information technologies differently as designers to “redirect”the ways in which these materials play a role in everyday economies and ecologies [1]. In 1947, J. Gordan Lippincott published a book called Design for Business. In it he has a chapter entitled “Obsolescence—The Keynote of a New Prosperity.” Here’s a short extract: “Our custom of Images of Sustainable Interactions: Seeing with the Lens of Sustainability