EDITOR Eli Blevis [e-mail]

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.