Value-sensitive design

Design can always be considered to address certain values. Design of mobile phones, forks, trousers or cars will all concern global humane values, sustainability, compassion, humility, social equality, intrinsic values... Even if the designers themselves did not explicitly address this.

When people use the designed artefacts, their own experiences and daily concerns can make them reflect on the design. For example, I could reflect on what kind of social equality the production of my jeans involves, or what kind of social equality or intrinsic values I address or experience when wearing them. Further, a female interactive agent acting as a customer-support on a web-page, such as Anna at IKEA, represents a "designed" woman. Such agents may mirror values in the current society, leading to a design that embody the designers stereotyped view of a female customer-support worker.

Values can also be hidden in our society. Our culture serves as our everyday filter, where our own perspective of values can disappear in a daily routine that we do not reflect upon. Further, our values are probably highly contextualized and vary in different settings, cultures, and our day to day mood.

Read more about value-sensitive design in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Interactions article, ACM, written by Batya Friedman.

Remake

Stockholms Stadsmission is a non-profit organization which sell secondhand gifts, such as cloths, furniture, books and other things, and the money goes to social work for homeless and young people in the Stockholm area.

A small experiment has now turned into a new cool brand; Remake. The idea involves to "remake" second hand gifts to make them more easy to sell. This is not like a traditional furniture renovation, where things are given a new color or fabric as a "facelift". Rather, this is about giving old furniture and clothes an entirely new appearance, grounded in creative artistic talents, with the ability to "see" new aesthetic potentials in old things. For example, an old wooden kitchen chair may appear, not with a new color, but with a varnish on top of a fashionable fabric. This also results in that such chairs, which before were hard to almost give a way for free, now can be sold for over 1000 swedish kronor (100 euro). Currently the brand has two different directions; remake furniture and remake clothing.

Electronic waste on the radio

This morning i listened to a swedish radio program called "Konflikt".
(The program is in swedish, possible to listen to again at the website)
The program discussed electronic waste shipped to African countries like Congo and Nigeria. It gave an interesting overview of different interests and concerns of people, organizations and corporations involving shipment of electronic waste. While people shipping old stoves and refrigerators etc regard that they are contributing to higher life-standards in Africa, BAN (see below) where concerned that only about 20% was actually functioning, and the rest could not be re-used. As these countries have no expertise or resources to deal with electronic waste, and products containing toxics are burnt. This already causes a severe environmental and human threat, and the electronic waste is radically increasing every year.

After such a program, it's easy to mostly see the negative impact of electronic products: radio, mobile phones, tv and Internet... Today they cause a tremendous load of toxic waste, but this is because we are working with technology built from a toxic design material (and which use loads of energy...). This can hopefully change, just as our current unsustainable consumption of such products. From another point of view, technology can also bring us emotionally closer to people, animals and nature in other parts of the world, and help us understand what needs to be done.

The program also briefly discussed Performance economy (a book by Walter Stahel)on how industrial countries can achive a sustainable economy and contribute to a sustainable world.

Basel Action Network (BAN)is an organization that confronts the global environmental injustice and economic inefficiency of toxic trade, such as toxic wastes, products and technologies) and its hazardous impacts, when being exported from rich to poorer countries. They also work with national self-sufficiency in waste management, to support global environmental justice. The goal is that no people or environments should be dispro-proportionately poisoned and polluted due to market forces and trade.

The power of design

This e-zine tries to expose the power of design from a sustainable viewpoint: "Design Philosophy Politics seeks to expose the enormous power of design: how it shapes what we desire and how we live; how it drives demands for resources and energy and with what consequences." DesignPhilosophyPolitics

Step by step

Kaizen is a japanese expression for continuous improvement. Kaizen methodology includes making changes and monitoring results, then adjusting (e.g. used by Toyota and some telecommunication and service provider companies in Japan). Large-scale pre-planning and extensive project scheduling are replaced by smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted as new improvements are suggested. For a consumer point of view, smaller changes in products make them more acceptable and reduces the curve as it is easier to gradually learn new services. For e.g. telecommunication companies, smaller changes make it possible to continuously charge for new services on the same device. Hopefully, this perspective could also make companies keep the same hardware a bit longer... as long as consumers easily can e.g. upgrade new software on their mobilephones.

Danny Seo (green-style gury) uses a similar perspective as the Kaizen methodology for sustainable consumption. Instead of demanding companies or consumers to make big changes at once, he promotes continuous changes. If it has to be all or nothing, we are likely to get nothing... Currently Danny is guiding celebrites to a green and stylish lifestyle, which hopefully can inpire others to follow in the same steps...

It's not just about foodmiles...

Food miles, which consumers are increasingly taking notice of, are not an accurate way of judging the total environmental impact. For example, fruit and vegetables trucked in from Spain could actually have a lower carbon footprint than those grown in UK greenhouses which use up lots of energy for heating.

Dr Andrea Collins from the Brass waste and resources research centre at Cardiff University and Dr Ruth Fairchild, a nutritional analyst at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, agree that the food miles concept is too simplistic. They argue that their recent research into the environmental impact of food points towards a better system of "ecological footprint" analysis. This measures a food's impact in "global hectares", the notional land area needed to provide the resources to produce it.

The research concluded that, on average, only around 2% of the environmental impact of food comes from transporting it from farm to shop.

Overall, around 20% of the UK's overall greenhouse gas emissions are related to food consumption. The footprint of an organic diet versus a non-organic diet and found that switching to organic brought a 22.9% reduction in the food footprint.

Read more in an article by Julie Ferry at the Guardian

Mircroorganisms for paint and textiles

Marta de Menezes latest project, Decon , is a collaboration with Lígia Martins whose research lab and involves a series of artworks inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings. The colors from those paintings are progressively degraded by the bacteria Pseudomonas putida MET94, a "microorganism of putrefaction." With an appetite for organic pollutants, this soil microbe has the potential to be used for bioremediation, a process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the environment altered by contaminants to its original condition. The research lab investigates the use of inoffensive bacterias to "clean" up textiles which are coloured with nocive chemicals. Cleaning and de-toxing them means that the textiles can then be recycled.


This is reblogged from "We make Money not Art".

Ecological receipts

Future shopping may involve ecological receipts... The printed information may e.g. include the number of cows or trees that are saved as a result of ecological consumption. The receipts can be printed for e.g. a hospital, a family or an individual customer. This is one of several projects investigated by the Swedish Future Trade (Framtida handel).

http://www.framtidahandel.se/