Interactions - September/October 2010

[ 9] Mankoff, J., Kravets, R., and Blevis, E. “Some Computer Science Issues in Creating a Sustainable World.” Computer 41, 8 (2008): 102–105.

best choice can vary from one location to another. Interaction design can play a role in ensuring that such choices are informed by scientific knowledge and interpretations of our collective best interests, rather than the economic interests of private-sector enterprises.

Computing issues. With respect to sustainability, the focus of attention on computing issues has centered on issues of energy use, including individual (personal computers), corporate (servers), and very large-scale (cloud- and grid-computing) levels. One of the promises of cloud computing is the possibility of using energy more efficiently as redundan-cies are removed from information-storage and retrieval systems. There is a need for interaction designers to make such efficiencies transparent to individual people [ 9]. Nonetheless, energy savings are only a small part of what is needed. We also need to focus on building systems that can track necessary information and interactivity that can inform human preparation for and adaptation to climate change. Such systems must make this information available at scale and in forms that are suitable to a number of different constituencies, individuals, policy makers, governments, and intergovernmental organizations.

These suggestions are just the start of the discourse that we as interaction designers must have to help prepare for and adapt to climate change as a concurrent strategy with present efforts to help prevent it.

September + October 2010

AbOut the AuthOrs Eli Blevis is an associ-ate professor of informatics in the Human-Computer Interaction Design program of the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. His primary area of research, and the one for which he is best known, Shunying Blevis is an independent scholar and social entrepreneur living and working in Bloomington, IN. She holds advanced degrees in informatics from Indiana University and Beijing Normal University. Her interests and practice also include design, locavorism, and permaculture.

interactions

ability of particular regions will need to be in place. Such data and predictions will be critical to providing for orderly absorption and evacuation, as environments change in terms of their habitability.

Living with fewer resources. Interactive systems are required to instruct people in urban and other environments on how to live with fewer resources, either as a matter of sustainable practices or as a matter of adapting to climate change or both.

Saving life. Social mechanisms—especially those that rely on interactive technologies—can hopefully play a role in fostering relationships between people at various levels of organization in order to ensure that as many people as possible have access to safe environments, with food and drinking water, and that people are actively engaged in helping others in the face of changes that might otherwise easily induce conflicts.

Fostering public and governmental support for technological solutions. Lovelock is himself not without hope; he outlines a number of geoengi-neering interventions that might reverse a positive feedback loop. One example is the conversion on a large scale of agricultural waste into char and burying it in the soil or possibly on the ocean floor [ 4]. The strategy is effectively a form of exploiting the power of photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a form that can be buried so that it is no longer part of the atmosphere. Lovelock: “So far it is the only realistic proposal by which we have even a chance of restoring the Earth to the state it was in before we started using fossil fuel.” Clearly, such projects require public and governmental support on a massive scale. Interaction design of social mechanisms of awareness to create such support is needed in a pervasive manner, as in the case of carbon calculators. Such systems can help inform choices about energy production; such choices likely vary from one location to another.

Fostering public understanding. Even for well-intentioned people, it’s not easy to make choices that help secure our collective future. The viability and greenhouse gas emissions effects of various methods of producing energy are not commonly understood. Moreover, various forms of energy production—nuclear, wind, hydro, bio-fuels, geothermal, solar thermal, solar voltaic, gas, diesel, oil, and coal—have very different implications for greenhouse gas emissions and food supplies and other side effects of energy production [ 4]. The