EDITOR
Eli Blevis
eblevis@indiana.edu
We knew that contract-renewal incentives of free
phones and fashion trends were part of the picture.
We knew as well that achieving sustainable phones
would also entail changes in terms of materials
science, engineering, business, and economics. But
understanding and influencing the user experience
with phones through interaction design, especially
with regards to the replacement and disposal experiences, seemed necessary and complementary
steps along the path to greener phones.
We undertook a qualitative study examining
people’s practices and perceptions of their phones
in which we surveyed 79 mobile phone owners and
then interviewed 10 of them who had had very
varied experiences—from throwing still-function-ing phones away in the trash to collecting the old
phones of others for use at a center for victims of
domestic violence. We probed users’ experiences
with acquiring, replacing, and disposing of mobile
phones and reporting our findings regarding
people’s practices and attribution of value to their
phones [ 5].
Our findings showed that while physical design
and functionality played a role in how people
selected a new phone, contract-renewal incentives
were far more likely to motivate the actual decision to replace an existing phone. We also found
that many people were not enthusiastic about
receiving new phones with a contract renewal, but
rather accepted it as standard practice in which
they engaged, even when they preferred their older
phone to the newer model. Additionally, we found
that people were generally aware of the potential
environmental hazards of throwing a phone in
the trash, but were often unaware of what their
options for responsible disposal were and found
that getting information about their options was
difficult or required too much effort. Considering
our data from this perspective, we identified several opportunities for rethinking mobile phone
design in which the phone itself or aspects of the
phone encourage sustainable actions [ 5]. Our findings suggest that many users would be receptive to
phones that are designed to be easily upgraded for
aesthetics or functionality as a viable alternative to
complete technology replacement with a contract
renewal. To address the difficulty of obtaining
information about end-of-service options, we suggested the design of phone that is aware of when
the user’s contract is close to expiration and takes
advantage of location awareness to send the user
an SMS suggesting local facilities for donation and
recycling, or other environmentally responsible
actions.
Considering the Context of a Phone
While considering ways to redesign phones is an
important step toward mobile phone sustainability,
in talking to people about their experiences with
mobile phones, it became clear to us that situation
was also a driving factor in the extent to which
people engaged in sustainable practices of disposal
and replacement. Thus we need to think not only
about the design of the phone, but also about how
to leverage and influence context outside of the
device itself to support sustainable phone practice.
More broadly, we introduce the notion of situated
sustainability, that idea that both a device and the
context in which it exists should be considered
first-order areas for design, and that an object’s
context must also be considered when evaluating
the sustainability of the object.
Aspects of the context in which a mobile phone
exists offer cues for design. Our findings indicated that serendipitous information and chance
encounters with resources in the environment
played a major role in the majority of sustainable
interactions. For example, some people learned
about recycling services because a friend happened
to mention one that they had used. Other participants learned the locations of phone-donation drop
boxes by seeing them in places they normally went
to, such as a synagogue or a cosmetics shop. These
findings suggest that we need to consider not only
how to change phones themselves, but also how to
change the contexts and environments in which
phones exist to amplify this information and make
it more visible, discoverable, and easily available.
We also discovered that there was a strong
social or community component to engaging in
sustainable phone disposal. Our study participants
often told us that engaging in phone recycling was
in some way a group activity, for example that one
member of a family would contact all of the other
members and collect the phones for recycling.
Another common practice was to “ask around”
when replacing a phone to try to find a recipient
for an old but still functional phone. We found that
people were generally unsuccessful in trying to
find a taker for the phone and gave up after asking a few friends or family members, eventually
putting the phone in storage or disposing of it in
[ 5] Huang, E. M.,
Truong, K. N. “Breaking
the Disposable
Technology Paradigm:
Opportunities for
Sustainable Interaction
Design for Mobile
Phones.” To appear in
the Proceedings of
CHI 2008.