habits began to change. We were able to save substantial amounts of money and energy. The success of these experiments has several possible causes.

Ordinary users experienced very few major inconveniences. They had to wake their computers up in the morning with a slight wiggle of the mouse, a small habit to adopt. If they needed to wake it up from home, they used a simple log-in application using existing usernames and passwords. The learning curve for this was marginal. Computers were set to go to sleep after a long period of inactivity rather than aggravating people by going to sleep during a coffee break or lunch. In short, the habit changes were automated by the BIOS change and were simple to adopt. Adopting more sustainable behavior was an easy, natural change.

IT professionals at the SOE were able to test changes to their nightly upgrade routine in the name of energy savings. They used native power-management settings and free software, adapt-ing it to meet our needs. It was a challenge, a puzzle, and a way to show that a vendor solution was not necessary. The programmers, designers, and IT staff could prove their contribution to the university. Adopting more sustainable behavior was an opportunity to be creative and test the limits.

Finally, the GoGreen gadget provided a way to actually see the savings add up over time. A visible reminder of our individual contribution to a large and complex world facilitated the adoption of more sustainable behavior. Adopting more sustainable behavior was both personal and communal.

to guide a print-reduction campaign, engaging end users by providing real-time data about their printing habits, exploring tools to encourage alternatives to printing, and designing interactive ways for them to pledge to reduce usage. We are also exploring the use of IT to manage and visualize energy consumption of the data centers, understand our electronic waste stream, and promote work practices such as telecom-muting and virtual offices, which reduce our footprint.

Editor’s Note: Have you designed and implemented a successful IT or interactivity project targeted at improving sustainable practices at your institution or for a client? If so, please consider contributing your story to this forum for a future issue. Contact Eli Blevis.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Kristin Hanks is a doc-
toral student in the School of Informatics and
Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. Her
research focuses on designing and implementing
sustainable IT projects in large organizations. She
is also striving to understand how we measure
environmental impacts and how to make such data more relevant
to individuals.

Larry Riss is the director of education technology
services in the School of Education at Indiana
University Bloomington. He has a passion for orga-
nizing small teams of creative people to solve prob-
lems—and then getting out of the way to let them
create. He also believes that we have a rich tech-
nology environment that is not fully utilized. So, by combining our
technical talent and rich environment, we can do anything!

Steve Schunk is associate director of system administration and infrastructure in the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington. His current interests include virtualization of servers, storage systems, and hardware in general.

Going Forward

Designers need to look for ways to make computing practices sustainable. We must incorporate such successful strategies to other projects. How do we promote habit change? How can we design IT to make sustainability a natural shift instead of an inconvenience? Can we use interaction design to harness human creativity and our love of solving problems? While it is easy to use technology to show how much we harm the environment—bombarding end users with frightening statistics—how can we use it to encourage small steps that add up to large benefits instead? At Indiana University we are using these concepts

Eli Blevis is an associate professor of informatics in
the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana
University Bloomington. He is contributing editor
for the Sustainably Ours forum. His primary
research concerns are sustainable interaction
design and design-oriented perspectives in the
confluence of HCI and design.

November + December 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1620693.1620699
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/1100 $10.00