Acting upon the
knowledge that our daily
activities have serious
repercussions on our
natural environment means
more than recycling soda
cans and toting our own bags
to the grocery store.

July + August 2009

interactions

the fall quarter and design, implement, and evaluate solutions in the winter. Prompted (though not required) to consider environmental sustainability, roughly one-third of the students ( 29 percent) chose to engage the theme. These students developed projects around questions such as: What are people’s understandings for hardware recycling? How can the display of bus schedules be improved to increase ridership in public transportation? How can online maps and social computing be used to encourage people to ride their bicycles more? And how can printing from a Web browser be improved to increase readability and decrease the use of paper and ink?

To support students’ thinking on environmental sustainability, while not privileging the environmental sustainability projects, we seeded the class with targeted ideas related to the theme. We expected that all teams would use these ideas, at least to some degree, and that the themes would strengthen classroom discourse. To do so in a meaningful but even-handed way, we developed several new approaches; among them was “environmental ripples.”

Environmental ripples bring to mind different ways in which information systems intersect with the natural world. At a minimum, most information systems make use of natural resources, whether ink on paper or electricity to power hardware. At the other end of the spectrum, some information systems, such as the Community Energy Platform described earlier, set out explicitly to address environmental

sustainability. In between these two endpoints exists a vast territory in which information systems designed for other primary goals can be applied or extended to further sustainability (or at least not unduly erode it). The environmental-ripples activity asks students to consider their own and their classmates’ capstone projects in light of these possibilities.

We structured the environmental-ripples class activity as follows: First, prior to class we prepared poster-size charts that listed each project by name and provided three columns, one for each type of environmental ripple: connection (“How does this capstone project ‘touch’ or ‘make contact’ with the natural environment?”), opportunity (“How could this capstone project be applied or extended to address an environmental problem?”), and impact (“How does this capstone project contribute to environmental sustainability?”). We hung the charts on the classroom walls before class began. During class we introduced students to the concept of an environmental ripple in general and to the three types—connection, opportunity, and impact. Each student received two 4x6-inch Post-it notes and was asked to identify an environmental ripple for his or her own capstone project and one for another team’s project (for the second project, students were asked to choose one that did not explicitly pursue an environmental theme). For each Post-it note, students were instructed to write: the project name; type of environmental ripple (connection, opportunity, or impact); the idea (be specific and detailed here…); and his or her name. Then students placed the Post-it notes in the appropriate column for the chosen capstone project.

Few projects came up empty-handed. Given the minimal requirements to qualify as a connection, that result is perhaps not surprising; however, for students it does drive home the idea that even technical projects, which seem far afield from environmental issues, have bearing on the natural environment. More surprising, for those capstone projects that were not pursuing environmental sustainability themes, students identified one or more opportunities for two-thirds ( 66 percent) and one or more impacts for one-third ( 33 percent) of the projects. For example, for a capstone project that involved providing real-time information for local concerts and