Interactions - September/October 2008

EDITOR Eli Blevis eblevis@indiana.edu

Personal Inventories in
the Context of Sustainability
and Interaction Design
William Odom

Indiana University | wodom@indiana.edu

Eli Blevis

Indiana University | eblevis@indiana.edu

Erik Stolterman

Indiana University | estolter@indiana.edu

What kind of relationships do people develop with the things they have at home? What is it that makes them keep and cherish certain things and discard others? And how is it possible to study these relationships in a way that could inform the design of sustainable interactive artifacts? The behaviors implicated in connecting sustainability to interaction design are diverse, particular, and individual. As such, we have considered various methods for untangling the complex nature of these behaviors. One of the main questions that prompts this inquiry and search for suitable methods is that of why we—most of us in industrialized contexts—prefer new things to old ones.

This article summarizes research we have been conducting that focuses on collecting individual personal inventories of objects and technologies that populate everyday life. The idea of personal inventories is to inform—and improve—interaction design practice as well as our knowledge of design in the context of sustainability.

The Ensouled Design

We all know that we prefer and even love some artifacts, while we are indifferent to others. We immediately fall in love with some things on the one hand, and our affections for some other things develop over time. For designers it is a challenge to design artifacts that immediately inspire love and continue to be cherished over time. The notion of “ensoulment” can be used to describe this kind of relationship between people and arti-

facts. Ensoulment is in Nelson and Stolterman’s The Design Way [ 1], described as “going beyond the notion of quality to suggest a mechanism by which to promote an aesthetic of well-loved designs.” We have elsewhere described the principle of promoting quality and equality of experience as the idea that the design of new artifacts ought to consider quality as a construct of affect and longevity in a way that could support means of renewal and reuse, by motivating “the prolonged value of such objects or systems and providing equality of experience to new owners of such objects and systems whenever ownership transfers [ 2].” We have also elsewhere described the material effect of achieving heirloom status—that is, creating “artifice of long-lived appeal that motivates preservation [ 2].” These concepts serve as a critical lens through which we investigate the nature of human-product relationships and explore how this knowledge can inform the design of future, longer-lasting interactive technology.

These issues have been explored across various disciplines in various other forms. However, we are specifically concerned with the particular qualities and circumstances contributing to how designs become “ensouled”—and thereby achieve “heirloom status”—in a way that is most accessible to interaction designers.

[ 1] Nelson, H. G. and E. Stolterman. Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. Englewood Cliffs: Educational Technology Publications, 2003. This same quote appears in E. Blevis and E. Stolterman, “Ensoulment and Sustainable Interaction Design,” IASDR 2007 Hong Kong: November 12-15, 2007, and W. Odom, “Personal Inventories: Toward durable human-product relationships,” In Ext. Abs. CHI ‘08. New York: ACM Press, 2008.

[ 2] Blevis, E. “Sustainable Interaction Design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse.” In Proc. CHI ’07. New York: ACM Press, 2007.

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