ok, so I am here actually in Seoul, Korea. I happen to be at a professional conference where Eli
Blevis is also attending, and Eli agreed to talk to me about his research on sustainability.
Eli wrote the paper that you all will be reading, the 2007 paper which won a Best Paper Award,
so I am really pleased that we are going to have this conversation. We're just going to
talk in general about where Eli thinks things are. Where do you think things are at given
where you were at when you wrote the 2007 paper? What's your opinion?
in HCI specifically folks did a lot of work on individual behavioral change, things like
home energy monitors. They were worried about how each individual person could save energy,
and to this day in fact we see lots and lots of papers that are focused on individual behavioral
change. More recently, and this is actually because of Bonnie and some others James Pierce there
has been a notion of Practice Theory, the idea that actually we need to worry more about
large scale practices than individual behavioral change in order to have some kind effect on
how we can adapt to what is ahead, and also how we can possibly mitigate it if there is
any possibility of mitigation, but there is only so much as an individual we can do. Then
we also I suppose need to worry about how we influence the practices of others. It's
well and good to say that people need to reduce and consume less and that they should take
public transportation or alternative forms of energy, alternate forms of transportation,
but the fact is our luxuries, people like their luxuries. People like private places.
Private places are a lot more comfortable than public places. They like their private
cars. Cars are not just about transportation. They are some kind of statement about identity.
I suppose that it is a lot to expect that people will want to assume an identity as
urban farmers rather than consumers of luxury. I think design is implicated in overconsumption.
This has been true. Folks like Victor Papanek is famous for saying that "There are a few
professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few." Then he went on to say
that design, and industrial design in particular, is about people consuming things they don't
need with money they don't have to impress others who don't care.
Pretty negative.
So, that might be a Midwestern United States position. I guess that design needs to be
about your ability, and in that sense digital technologies are the most insidious of all
materials because they cause the premature destruction of physical materials. I'm guilty
myself. I have a new laptop this year. I had a new one last year. It's just not made very
well and because I type a lot I broke the backspace key on my laptop.
You had to replace the whole thing?
Well, I went to try to replace the keyboard on my own. It was too impossible to do it
and I didn't have the time before coming here.
That's bad design. It should be easy to replace that, right?
It should be easy to replace, and anyhow if you think about it I really tried to live
with it in fact because the metaphor of having a laptop that has no backspace key was kind
of appealing to me.
You tried to make it work.
I guess so, but in the end actually you do find you want to erase things. So yes, I mean
that's fine. On the other hand, these glasses were made in the 1950s.
No kidding? You just keep getting the lenses replaced?
Right.
Fantastic.
Yes. I think vintage things and durable things matter and as designers we could try to figure
out how to make at least the material portions of our technology durable even if the soft
part, the software parts will change. That was kind of the promise of software, but in
fact it's the opposite effect.
Yes. Do you think that that comes from the fact that companies need to keep selling us
new stuff to make money? Or, is there some fundamental attachment we have to always getting
new things?
We like new things, that's for sure, but they don't need to be new new. They can be new
to us. In the 2007 paper I have something in it which I call the principle of quality
and equality. There the idea is that we should really only make things that are durable and
of high quality and then second, third, fourth owners will appreciate them and have an equality
of experience. That's not always possible because technology obsoletes things. We want
more and more capability and we want less power consumption and things that we hold
and more power. We want to watch streaming video, not something we would have thought
we needed to do 10 years ago. All that takes energy and that becomes a much larger percentage
of the world's energy. I think it already exceeds the airlines by a lot.
Yes, right. How can we sort of break through this cycle that we're in?
On an individual level I think that you can try to use less or try to only buy things
that are durable. If you'd like to have something new, try to find something old that might
be just as nice. That's just one personal study, you try to grow your own food and try
to consume less. On a practices level, try to work with your... by the way, this taxonomy
of individual practice policy is something I've gotten from Bonnie and her writing. At
the practices level you need to try to argue in your community, and in your local community
especially you need to try to set an example in a good way. At the policy level you need
to be active also to try to influence policy both in terms of governments so that we have
leaders who are sensitive to this, but also in terms of enterprise too. You can help to
find alternative economic models. Companies can have viable enterprise plans that focus
more on services and less on material consumption.
Yes, I think that is one of the key solutions myself, services.
Yes, and that's fine because services are a luxury too.
Right, right, exactly. Alright, well, let's end on a positive note with things that people
can do and think more about. Thank you so much Eli. That was really interesting.