A Sustainable Identity: The Creativity of an Everyday Designer

By Ron Wakkary and Karen Tanenbaum

Summary:

This paper brought to the surface the inadequacies of interaction design in that they are consumer based, and not designed for sustainability. This paper goes into research to study how the end-user is an 'everyday designer' in that they adapt products to fit their required needs (design-in-use), and that several of these sustainable principles could be implemented for interaction design. The target of this paper was an ethnography study involving three families in which the authors studied how these families would redesign and reuse items in their household to fit their changing needs.

A lot of the study for this paper was based off of Blevis’s principles for SID (Sustainable Interaction Design) which in short are: disposal, salvage, recycling, remanufacturing for reuse, reuse as is, achieving longevity of use, sharing for maximal use, achieving heirloom status, finding wholesome alternatives to use, and active repair of misuse. There were three specific examples included in this paper that were accompanied with their possible implementations into interaction design.

The first example in this paper was a planner book, which showed the SID principles of promoting renewal and reuse, as well as linking invention and disposal. One of the participants, Lori, had a planner in which instead of using the template layout and calendar features of the original design, instead adapted it to fit her needs by using it to take notes and make lists with the additional use of sticky notes which when used could easily be discarded. The possible implications of this that could be used for interaction design are:

1. Design the capacity for users to overlook the formalized design and still find the artifact usable in ways equal to or greater than the original design intentions for use.
2. Incorporate materials and software qualities to allow for renewal and invention.

The planner book from the above example can be seen below:


Figure 1 Lori shows how a sticky note allows reuse of a page of her planner.

The third example given in this paper was a recipe book which was originally a journal of the participants mother, which now was not only a recipe book but was also used to store very important information like Christmas lists. This example illustrates the principle of promoting quality and equality. Its possible interaction design implications are:

1. Consider collaboration to include the broader notion of sharing, e.g. conceive of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) designed for maximal use by a family and therefore is easily shared;
2. Consider that longevity in interactive technology is not only a result of usefulness and that we design emotional qualities into artifacts.

The recipe book of this example can be seen below.


Figure 2 Kerry's recipe book was originally her mother's
journal and has been in use for over a decade.

The third example presented in this paper was a family calendar placed on the refrigerator. The hopes of this calendar was that the whole family would use it and that it would be an easy way for them to see everyone's schedule. However, in some cases this was not practical. Although this worked well for the mother who was involved in most of all the families activities, the father was reluctant to put his running schedule on the calendar since it really only affected him. In another case the daughter chose not to put some of her schedule on the calendar since she preferred to keep it private. The sustainable interaction design illustrated by this example was sharing for maximal use, but in several contexts this conflicted with de-coupling ownership and identity as seen by the withholding of some information from the calendar. The possible implications of this example are:

1. Design for maximal sharing
2. Allow for low risk ad hoc and public testing/experimentation

The calendar mentioned in this example is shown below:


Figure 3 Timmie placing a sticker on the family calendar.

The results of the ethnography done by the authors lead to the formation of design-in-use principles that work alongside Blevis's sustainable interaction design principles. However it is important to note that the authors believe that rather than focus on the material properties of the design as does Blevis, that instead the focus should be on the use of the object and its reuse/adaptability.

The design-in-use principles developed in this paper are:

• Design-in-use involves a high degree of creativity that in the best sense of the word makes a user unpredictable.
• Design artifacts become resources for further creativity as an outcome of design-in-use.
• Design-in-use qualities emerge over time as do design actions.

The paper also discusses how the user should be viewed differently than just a consumer. As stated in the paper, 'We claim that the everyday designer represents a sustainable identity for the user, one that is different than the traditional HCI construct.' The differences they mentioned are:

• From consumer to creator
• From over-determined to underdetermined
• From user to designer

In conclusion this paper believes that if the focus of the consumer changes to that of an everyday-designer, and that with their principles for sustainability and the focus of design-in-use that interaction design can be done to promote sustainability.

Discussion:

This paper brought an interesting and abstract idea to interaction design in that products should be modeled with sustainability in mind. I think this is an ever growing importance in today's world; that people are more and more focused on conservation. This makes me think of some of the electronic devices that I have. When they go bad, what happens to them? You can't really adapt them to work for other scenarios and fixing them can be timely and costly, so most of them just get thrown out. The bad thing about this is that in most cases that was the way they were designed, for use and then discard. I think the shift mentioned in this paper that the user should instead be viewed as an everyday designer rather than a consumer can really have an impact on how things should be designed and the type of products that we could potentially get from this.