Mike Jones from Smart Design posted an e-mail to the ixda list that I'll selectively quote from below. if you want the whole e-mail, let me know and I'll forward it.
"I work at a product design company filled with designers looking to develop products that are less damaging and more environmentally friendly, but for the most part, interaction designers are stuck on the sidelines developing interfaces and screens that don't have any of the material or manufacturing choices of industrial designers. This has been frustrating-- I hate feeling like I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Obviously, the most environmentally friendly product we can create is no product at all, and often interaction design is better at this than industrial design when we are able to turn a product into a
service. I'm going to go ahead and make a sweeping generalization
that interaction design is more sustainable than other forms of design, but I refuse to believe that our work is done and we simply need to keep doing what we're doing. "
Hmmmm... I don't buy it. Product may often use less power than their sevice counterparts due to the delivery channel of the service. Often, a product can enable an individual to do something that could only previously be performed by a service, reducing overall energy expendetures.
Anyway, he has a good part later on about how sustainability is not just about power consumption:
"Do we resist putting "print" buttons on websites? Do we aim for smaller applications because down the road this means less storage devices and less electricity used to transport all those bytes? Should our sustainable concerns focus on social issues, like the social benefits of community software, universal information access, and self-empowerment? Should we be building power consumption meters into every product's interface?
What are the best practices of sustainable interaction design?"
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