local community and/or serve environmental ends. To provide some unimplemented examples of how these systems might work, consider the following project ideas:

• Wickedly Expensive Local Green Products and Services. Each local community maintains some directory of the greenest members of that community, anyone from farmers to manufacturers to recyclers. These individuals are reimbursed for their services well beyond the sheer financial need, in exchange for explicit acknowledgment of the purchaser via a website or other medium. The green community members benefit from the increased prices, and the conspicuous consumers are honored for their contributions.

• Integrated Environmental Action and Dating.

While organizations such as the Sierra Club already have “singles” events, few if any of them explicitly celebrate their most vigorous volunteers in an obvious, accurate, and unfakeable way. An online dating system could be designed such that, for each time a person spends a day planting trees, his or her profile could be listed higher in the site’s search results.

• Craigslist-to-Credit-Card Ratio. Craigslist could team up with credit card companies to enable people to have an officially sanctioned score of what percentage of their purchases are made through Craigslist (or other recycling venues) rather than through providers of brand-new goods. The system could provide people with a dynamically updating widget that they could include on their blog or website. Used IKEA table—$40. Sustainable capitalism—priceless.

Each of these examples may have conceptual problems or implementation challenges, but perhaps they can initiate a conversation about how to enable conspicuous consumption in ways that are more environmentally sustainable than current online systems. By tracking, analyzing, and sharing the pro-social squandering of resources that a community cares about, systems such as these may provide pathways for people to engage in conspicuous consumption in ways that match their ideologies. Doing so can help people find friends, business associates, and romantic partners who belong to similar communities, and who share similar values.

A concern that has been raised involves the possibility that these systems could be seen as gauche or tacky. Volunteerism, for example, loses

its charm if one toots one’s own horn about it. However, there are clear examples that this does not need to be the case. The “I Gave Blood” or “I Voted” stickers often seen around college campuses and other communities demonstrate that it is not necessarily frowned upon to wave a flag for civic engagement. While it would certainly be important to remain aware of this potential challenge, it is certainly not an unsolvable problem.

This article draws inspiration from human biology and social behavior for the design of novel technological systems that can help us live together more sustainably. While we are smarter than monkeys, the Earth has begun to suffer from the success enabled by our intelligence. Human technology has looked to biology many times for inspiration, from robots to AI to flying machines (including the airplane in which I’m flying right now). Perhaps we can look to biology for inspiration once again and design systems that satisfy our evolved needs. Systems that let us engage in conspicuous consumption (as we appear to need to do in order to demonstrate our quality as social or sexual partners) but that do so without wasting resources unnecessarily could be the basis for new social interaction styles. An understanding of the biological and cultural issues underlying these phenomena could help inform the creation of a range of new technological systems that support these novel interactions.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Eli Blevis, Richard Anderson, Jon Kolko, Rebecca Black, Katie Clinton, Linda Ward, and Steve Price for their feedback and discussions that contributed to this article.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bill Tomlinson is an
assistant professor of informatics at the University
of California, Irvine, and a researcher in the
California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology. His research focuses on
the intersection between the field of human com-
puter interaction and the world’s growing environmental concerns.
He holds an A.B. in biology from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in
experimental animation from CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees
from the MIT Media Lab.

November + December 2008

DOI: 10.1145/1409040.1409051
© 2008 ACM 1072-5220/08/1100 $5.00