[ 2] Lippincott, J. Gordon. Design for Business. Chicago: Paul Theobald And Company, 1947, 14-15.

[ 3] There are many examples of sustainability aware business press books, such as Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins’ Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1999) as an early example. A short media piece called “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard (http:// www.storyofstuff. com/) also provides a modern counterpoint to Lippincott’s point of view.

trading in our automobiles every year, of having a new refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, or electric iron in every three or four years is economically sound. Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history. It is truly an American habit, and it is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it is contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity—the law of thrift—of providing for the unknown and often-feared day of scarcity [ 2].”

It is doubtful that anyone would write such an opinion nowadays [ 3]. Nonetheless, it is incumbent on us as interaction designers to understand the ways in which such opinions common in the past half century have designed our present ways of consuming products, especially those built with the materials of information technologies. Such understandings are required to provide the insights needed to design sustainable alternatives—both material and systemic—to the unsustainable proposition of premature obsolescence as a necessary correlate to prosperity. Moreover, the example of consumption set in America and in a few other countries as well cannot scale globally.

The images presented here are nearly all recent and taken at various places in the world, opportunistically—the contrasts and similarities between these different places are part of the point of collecting them together here in series. They are not necessarily chosen to work together aesthetically as a set. In this first collection, we present a broadly constructed group of three images from mainland China and three from the U.S.

We would love for readers to submit their own images of sustainability. For more information please see the online version of interactions, http://interactions.acm.org.

A clock is implemented in a mall in St. Louis by use of a computer projector. Here, a device that traditionally does not use very much energy has been replaced by one that uses a lot of energy, aesthetics aside.

May + June 2008

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Eli Blevis serves on the faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Design program of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. Blevis’s primary area of research, and the one for which he is best known, is sustainable interaction design. This area of research and Dr. Blevis’s core expertise are situated within the confluence of human computer interaction as it owes to the computing and cognitive sciences, and design as it owes to the reflection of design criticism and the practice of critical design. Dr. Blevis has published more than 40 articles and papers and has given several invited colloquia internationally on sustainable interaction design and the larger context of notions of design. Shunying Blevis is a fashion designer who lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.