EDITOR Eli Blevis eblevis@indiana.edu
Indiana University | eblevis@indiana.edu
Shunying Blevis Designer | san@indiana.edu
This issue begins the first of a series of collected images concerned with sustainability and interaction design. In keeping with the new theme of interactions magazine—promoting interactions—it is our hope that these images will stimulate many discussions, actions, and reactions. The subtlety of images is here offered as a complement to the potentially precise, yet oftentimes reductive expression of text.
By now issues of sustainability make frequent appearance in the everyday press; most readers of interactions may have accepted the need for acting more sustainably with respect to interaction design, its contexts, and its effects. The big question is what to do differently. The images that follow—some of which are more connected to the context of the effects of interaction design than directly to interaction design itself—are all targeted at fostering a collective way of looking differently at the materials and machinery of unsustainable consumption with an eye toward doing things differently in the future. These images are quite broad in scope, and the relationship between the contexts pictured and interactivity is very broadly interpreted.
The images and descriptions that follow are not necessarily solution concepts for more sustainable interactive design, nor are they necessarily observations targeted at raising awareness—awareness is already high. Rather, these images are targeted at stimulating insights about how to use the materials of interactive information technologies differently as designers to “redirect”the ways in which these materials play a role in everyday economies and ecologies [ 1].
In 1947, J. Gordan Lippincott published a book called Design for Business. In it he has a chapter entitled “Obsolescence—The Keynote of a New Prosperity.” Here’s a short extract: “Our custom of
[ 1] The notion of design in the perspective of sustainability as a “redirective practice” is owed to Tony Fry. His forthcoming book, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice from Berg Publishers, continues this notion.
This image honors and mimics Andreas FeiningerÕs famous 1951 self portrait. The viewfinder in this ÒtributeÓ photo is the same type and vintage as the one used by Feininger, except it is now used on a modern digital camera made by RicohÑa fixed-focal-length, niche-market camera designed with documentary-style photography in mind. The use of an accessory optical viewfinder is part of the cameraÕs intentional design, which, in addition to promoting a certain style of photography, increases battery life when used as an alternative to the LCD viewfinder. Software tools like Photoshop make the task of mimicking the darkroom effects required to reinterpret FeiningerÕs image much easier to accomplish.
May + June 2008
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