Interactions - July/August 2009

other events, students identified an environmental opportunity to support efficient route finding, carpooling, and public transportation as part of the application; for another project that developed a preliminary framework for using hand gestures as an input device, students recognized that the use of hands for input would minimize the need for hardware peripherals (e.g., mice, trackballs).

Environmental ripples, simple as they are, do lead students to this kind of creative thinking. It’s not that we showed students the environmental implications and opportunities for their work; rather, with appropriate scaffolding, students discovered some of these implications for themselves. More generally, by seeking to make environmental sustainability the central focus of an undergraduate capstone experience through well-chosen activities, we and our students found that concepts related to sustainability pervaded a range of information system designs— in effect, we began a cultural shift in our own thinking about information system design.

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. We need a cultural shift. That shift involves reconsidering what tools we “need,” how we design those tools, how we use them, and how we deal with the tools when they are no longer necessary. Information systems—tools for creating, storing, and sharing knowledge—can play a powerful role in achieving and maintaining this shift. In particular, interactive computing tools are well poised to make the connections between our actions and energy consumption visible, connect local communities to geographically distant ones impacted by local choices, and keep a record for future generations so they can better understand our current knowledge and choices and thereby learn from our successes and failures. To achieve these kinds of ends, we need to do no less than reconsider how we think about the design of these technologies, for the long term.

Jeremy Parks, Braden Pellett—undergraduates in the Informatics 2008 Capstone Class at the University of Washington and University of Washington Campus Engineering. This material is based, in part, upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0325035. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Batya Friedman is a professor in The Information School at the University of Washington. She pioneered value sensitive design (VSD), an approach to account for human values in the design of information systems. First developed in human-computer interaction,

VSD has since been used in information management, human-robotic interaction, urban planning, and, most recently, the life sciences. Friedman’s work has focused on the values of privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, environmental sustainability, and human dignity; and engaged such technologies as Web browsers, urban simulation, robotics, open source tools, and ubiquitous computing. She is currently working on a method for envisioning and multi-lifespan information system design—new ideas for leveraging information systems to shape our future. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1988.

David G. Hendry is associate professor at The
Information School, University of Washington,
where he teaches courses in human-computer
interaction, information system design, foundations
of information science, among others. He is cur-
rently investigating tools, practices, and systems
that create the conditions for sustainable, inclusive participation in
the design of information systems. He is conducting studies with
museum curators, counselors in drop-in centers for homeless
young people, and facilities engineers at the University of
Washington. Hendry has published work focused on information
management in design, design education, search, and end-user
programming. In 1998, before joining the iSchool in 2002, he creat-
ed the User Experience Group at Lycos—one of the first Internet
search engines—where he conducted user research on a variety of
Internet search and communication products.

Lisa Nathan will join the faculty of the School of
Library, Archives, and Information Science at the
University of British Columbia in July 2009.
Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of
Washington’s Information School, her research
interests include information system interaction the-
ory and methods, sustainable interaction design, and value sensi-
tive design. In 2008 Nathan’s multi-year ethnographic investigation
on the use of information technology in sustainability-oriented com-
munities won second prize in the CHI student research competi-
tion. Through field work in Tanzania, Rwanda, and the U.S. she
continues to develop methods for envisioning and improving the
long-term influence of information system interaction on the human
condition.