Situated Sustainability
for Mobile Phones
Elaine M. Huang

Motorola Labs and RWTH Aachen University | elaine. m.huang@motorola.com

Khai N. Truong

University of Toronto | khai@cs.toronto.edu

[ 1] http://www.gartner. com/press_releases/ asset_132473_ 11.ht ml

[ 2] NPD Group: “143 Million Mobile Phones Sold in the US in 2006” http://www.itfacts.biz/ index.php?id=P8297

[ 3] “U.S. Wireless Mobile Phone Evaluation Study,” J.D. Power and Associates, 2007.

Worldwide sales of mobile phones are expected to exceed one billion by the year 2009 [ 1]. In 2006, 143 million mobile phones were sold in the United States alone [ 2], and a 2007 study showed that American consumers use their phones for only an average of 17. 5 months before replacing them [ 3]. Despite the global proliferation of phones, only 5 percent of phones are ever recycled [ 2], thus leading to a massive potential problem of e-waste.

factors add to the proliferation of devices and disposal of technically functional phones.

When we began our study of mobile phone replacement and disposal practices, we were motivated by two goals stemming from the disposable technology paradigm. Our first goal was to understand what factors influenced people’s decisions to replace their phones and what their practices for doing so were. Our second motivating goal for studying this phenomenon was to take that understanding and apply it toward the design of “greener” phones—those that would encourage longer use, less frequent disposal, more sustainable replacement practices, and overall reductions in e-waste. After undertaking our study, however, we discovered the importance of context in how people replace and dispose of their phones and realized that this context, in addition to the design of the object itself, should be taken into account when designing for and assessing the sustainability of objects. This approach, which we term situated sustainability, supports the identification of the various challenges and opportunities for improving the sustainability of the object on a broader scale.

[ 4] Blevis, E. “Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse.” In the Proceedings of CHI 2007, 503-512.

Phones as Disposable Technology? There is an increasingly common trend of acquiring technologies, most notably consumer electronics, with the expectation that they will be replaced or disposed of before they cease to be functionally viable. We refer to this trend as the disposable technology paradigm, and it is visible in increasingly ubiquitous devices such as laptops and portable mp3 players, which are typically replaced within a few years and whose usage lifetime is often much shorter than their functional lifetime. Mobile phones appear to be the most widespread example of such “disposable” technologies, and we therefore chose them as the starting point for our research into this phenomenon. The proliferation of these devices is a leap for communication capability, but their rapid consumption and turnover pose an increasingly urgent problem of waste and pollution. Mobile phones are a unique case of e-waste in many ways. Unlike most other personal devices, they often have a built-in replacement cycle as users receive a new device on a regular basis by renewing their service contracts, regardless of the state of their previous device. And in the case of North America, where we conducted our study, technology incompatibility can also necessitate getting a new phone, for example when someone switches from CDMA service to GSM service. These

Toward Sustainable Mobile Phone Design Our perspective in approaching this work was strongly influenced by the rubric posited by Eli Blevis, in which he suggests several ways to understand and critique the sustainability of a design by considering such crucial issues as whether its components can be recycled, whether it lends itself to being shared or passed along to others, and whether the design promotes longevity of use [ 4]. We did not harbor illusions that the treatment of mobile phones as disposable technologies was either solely due to their design or a problem that could be solved entirely through better interaction design.