Hope for the Best and Prepare
for the Worst: Interaction Design
and the Tipping Point
Eli Blevis
Indiana University at Bloomington | eblevis@indiana.edu
Shunying Blevis
Indiana University at Bloomington | san@indiana.edu
pare for and adapt to climate change under the
possibility that we will reach a tipping point, or
the possibility that we have already done so.
In what follows, we describe the present state
of sustainable interaction design. We describe the
potential role of interaction design in preparation
for and adaptation to a post–tipping point world
in terms of digital projects we may undertake for
monitoring global conditions, setting public policies, and informing public behaviors, and in terms
of arenas of potential effects and concern, such
as water supplies, rebalancing of ecosystems, food
supplies and food safety, dangers to habitations
(especially coastal ones), health, and migration. We
characterize computational concerns in the context
of preparation and adaptation to climate change
and note the similarities and differences with computational concerns targeted at inducing behavioral
change to reduce greenhouse gases.
September + October 2010
interactions
Typical interaction designers are not climate
scientists, but interaction designers can make
well-informed use of climate sciences and closely
related sciences. Interaction design can make
scientific information, interpretations, and perspectives available in an accessible and widely
distributed form so that people’s consciousness
is raised. Such consciousness raising is our only
hope to empower individuals, groups, nations,
and the international community to possibly
prevent or reverse climate change and at least
prepare and adapt to it in as safe and orderly
a manner as possible—with the goal of securing a sustainable future for and the well-being
of each and every individual person, creature,
and habitat, inasmuch as it is possible to do so.
Interaction design can help bridge the gap
between scientific predictions and notions of
certainty and uncertainty on the one hand and
public conventional wisdoms that, however well
intentioned, may lead to an unsustainable future
or inadequate responses to climate change on the
other hand.
The possibilities concerning the imminence
of global warming and climate change, or at
least the arrival of a tipping point, have implications for how we think about sustainability
and interaction design. We are at a crossroads
where the logic that applies is the logic of hoping for the best and preparing for the worst—that
is, we need to continue our efforts to develop
digital interactivity to induce people and societies to engage in behavioral changes that reduce
our greenhouse gas emissions. We also need to
develop digital interactivity that allows us to pre-
the tipping Point
The tipping point, by definition, is the point at
which any efforts to stop something from happening arrive too late. According to the 2007 Nobel
Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), we are at imminent risk of reaching
a tipping point with respect to climate change and
beyond the point at which even the very best case
scenarios predict a certain unavoidable amount of
climate change. The IPCC states:
“There is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change
impacts; however, they can complement each other and
together can significantly reduce the risks of climate
change. Adaptation is necessary in the short and longer
