Interactions - November/December 2010

Until we address
the culture of
consumption and
growth, many
efforts to enact
efficiency will
simply result in our

decisions—and we will need to accept some level of error because of that imperfection. However, by allowing sustainable ideals to influence all the decisions we make in all aspects of our lives, from how we work, to how we vote, to how we raise our children, we can hope to avoid some of the worst predicted outcomes and instead live lives of closer connection to our communities and ecosystems.

civilization being
“more efficiently
unsustainable.”

[ 2] Hellman, J., “633 Penn. Ave, NW” Virtual Adjacency, 2010; http:// www.virtualadjacency. com/?page_id=5/ [ 3] Moos, M., Andrey, J. and Johnson, L. 2006. “The Sustainability of Telework: An ecological-footprinting approach.” Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 2, 1 (2006).

November + December 2010

[ 4] Winn, J. “Green ICT: More Efficiently Unsustainable?” Presentation, 2010; http://www.slideshare. net/josswinn/green-ict-more-efficiently-unsustainable/

future will be more like a club than a factory” [ 2], primarily supporting social interactions among workers when other activities are conducted elsewhere. Despite a great deal of support for telework in the service of sustainability, it is nevertheless challenging to assess the potential benefits of specific instances of telework [ 3]. Determining which work locations support sustainability most effectively, through the work activities themselves as well as the lifestyles of the workers, is a critical factor in this transition.

interactions
[ 5] Ehrhardt-Martinez,
K. and J. A.S. Laitner.
“Rebound, Technology
and People: Mitigating
the Rebound Effect
with Energy-Resource
Management and
People-Centered
Initiatives.” In
Proceedings of the
ACEEE 2010 Summer
Study on Energy
Efficiency in Buildings.

Work Toward Different Goals Finally, in many areas of work, efforts to support sustainability are currently enacted through efforts to increase efficiency. The theory goes that, through greater efficiency, we can do the same work with fewer resources. But efficiency often leads to other, unintended consequences.

Rather than reducing consumption, the savings from efficiency are often reinvested to spur more growth, are passed on to shareholders who buy more goods with their greater wealth, or are used to reduce the price of goods, thereby causing consumers to buy more or even enabling entire new industries to arise. While efficiency may provide significant social benefits by enabling goods and services to be provided at a lower price, efficiency is beneficial to sustainability only if the savings further sustainable ends. Until we address the culture of consumption and growth, many efforts to enact efficiency will simply result in our civilization being “more efficiently unsustainable” [ 4]. Nevertheless, systemwide, intelligently applied efficiency has important benefits [ 5]. If we manage to rein in our vast consumption, at both individual and institutional levels, efficiency can help us live both sustainably and well, and will, in the final analysis, be part of the solution. For the time being, though, we need to differentiate between those efficiencies that are part of the solution and those that are part of the problem, and help workers direct their efforts toward the most effective sustainability-related efforts.

The ideas in the preceding paragraphs have featured a number of caveats, reflecting the inherent complexities of sustainability and representing the way we will need to engage with many topics in the future. We will need to make decisions, in work and in all other aspects of life, based on imperfect information—as we do now, but with a greater consideration of environmental implications of those

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank
Lisa Nathan and Jon Kolko for
inspiring this article. The Social
Code Group, Rebecca Black, M. Six
Silberman, James White, Andrew
Correa, Sam Kaufman, Skip
Laitner, Jay Hellman, Greg Norris,
Aimee deChambeau, and Stu Ross
improved the article through their
feedback and discussions. Thanks
also go to the Donald Bren School
of Information and Computer
Sciences at UCI and the California
Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology for
their support. This material is based
in part upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. 0644415 and by
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

About the Author Bill Tomlinson is an associ-ate professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a researcher at the California

Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. His research focuses on the intersection between infor-mation technology and the world’s growing environmental concerns. Tomlinson 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.