A Sustainable Train of Thought

Great post by Alexandra over at designswarm, where she talks about industrial design, responsibility, sustainability, and the perils of mass production at any volume.

One of the things I identified in my thesis work is the need for legislation to support necessary causes. Free markets cannot be 100% free: every game requires SOME rules, and legislation needs to set those rules in the free market. So political will must exist to legislate for change. And of course political will is derived from the will of the people. HOW that change occurs is not as important as stating that it’s important and necessary, and that we need to be THERE instead of HERE. The how of it all should be left to the markets to decide, because that’s what they do best.

So we need legislation to define the rules, and we need education and production to supply the materials. One of my major gripes is that so-called “green architecture” is separated out from ‘regular architecture” by virtue of calling it green. I don’t want to talk about green architecture. Rather, what I would like to see is no distinction at all between “green” and “regular” architecture. That is, architecture absorbs the values of green architecture and it’s just the way things are done. Period.

Maybe the same thinking needs to happen in industrial design. That is, get things to a point where there’s no distinction between green industrial design and traditional industrial design. Maybe the motivation for doing so lies outside of the field itself. Because, as Alex points out, who really cares about something once it’s outside of your domain? I made the prototype, now I’m on to the next one and it’s your business to dispose of it. Not unlike all of those old computers that end up in China.

So we need to get out there and talk to people about why it’s important to learn and invent new ways of making things, and it’s important to educate people enough so they demand change. Markets consist of supply and demand, yet even as we have more tools for expressing ourselves these days than at any other point in history, I feel like everyone’s given up on stimulating demand. That is, making their voices heard, demanding change, specifying a new future they’d rather live in. This is not a unique paradox.

That sounds awfully like a manifesto, and perhaps it is. I’m a little reluctant to label it as such because manifestos have an unpopular aura around them. But maybe the problem with manifestos in the past has been their lack of circulation outside of the field they address. For example, how many non-Graphic Designers know of First Things First?

So lay it out: Here is the current state of the industrial design industry. This is why this industry is important. This is what’s not so great about it and why. This is where we need to be and why. And this is why you (the ordinary, non-industrial designer) needs to care about this.

Get ordinary people to read it. Get industrial designers to read it. Get politicians to read it. Get them to sign it. And give them some means of action beyond signing. Help them take it to the next level by bringing action closer to the point of decision: YES, I want to change this, and hey, here’s something I can do right now.

Maybe that’s voting with your dollars, and here are some materials you’ll want to avoid, or companies which are better than others. Maybe that’s reading up on the matter, with a selection of books on the subject. Or maybe…what else can you think of?

The problem as I see it is that I am not an industrial designer and therefore do not have access to the industrial design world. Yet I am deeply affected by everything that industry does, because as a consumer I buy everything they make! So how can we get a dialog going? I want to support those industrial designers trying to make a difference. Maybe that’s through the money I spend, but maybe it’s also by giving them a voice, by giving them support in their decisions, by helping them push change through their industry.

Industrial designer: “See, it’s not just me! I’ve got a list of 10,000 people who will buy a product if it has these attributes and costs this much.”

The markets are out there. We need to make them heard.

It’s not just markets though. It’s also citizenry. And industrial designers are the best positioned to talk about the materials they use. Get some toxicologists in there and enumerate the problems with those materials. Don’t blame anyone, but suggest alternatives. What materials can we use instead? Talk to McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. After all, it’s your health that’s at stake. And we need your help to enact change. Talk to your politicians and get them concerned about these issues to. Because if people start getting concerned about these issues, politicians will have to listen, and legislation will have to be passed. That’s the kind of country we live in, but it only works if we, the people, have the motivation and perseverance to pursue that kind of change.

The point is, a single movement in a single industry isn’t going to change things as effectively as a multi-faceted approach: education, politics, citizens, professionals.

And we need tools to achieve these ends. How can we enable people to enact and encourage change on their own? We’ve got blogs, we’ve got Web 2.0, we’ve got a rising awareness of environmental issues…seems to me like we’ve got the ingredients to go out there and begin to make a difference.

So why don’t we?

I was in San Francisco this afternoon and decided to stop by the Sony Metreon while on the way to meet some friends for dinner. Turns out the Metreon has about seven Playstation 3 machines in a roped-off area. I stuck around and played three games: a basketball game, Genji (a sword-fighting game), and an off-road racing game. The basketball game was pretty much just like every other basketball game I’ve ever played, except perhaps for prettier graphics. The off-road racing game was probably the best of the three games with some great graphics, but it’s not exactly a unique genre and the game-play wasn’t exactly ground-breaking either.

The sword-fighting game Genji deserves its own paragraph. Unbelievably, I managed to freeze this game: my character walked into another room and the game froze—the attendant had to get some keys to open the case to push the restart button. Prior to the game freezing, it seemed like it consisted of ten seconds of sword-fighting, a break while the PS3 loaded up a cut scene, then another break while the PS3 played the cut scene, then more loading before I spent another ten seconds fighting, a break while the PS3 loaded up a new room for me to enter, etc. While this behavior was most noticeable on Genji, the load times for the other games tended to be long enough to be annoying.

I’m not saying that the PS3 doesn’t have some strong points, such as amazing graphics: I briefly played some PS2 game at another station and can attest to the glaring difference between platforms (unless the PS2 games are somehow down-sampled to make the PS3 look even better). I am saying, however, that the novelty of amazing graphics wears off eventually, and in the end you’re left with a console that doesn’t really offer anything new in the way of unique interactions.

Contrast this state of affairs with the Wii, which offers a unique input system and focuses on game-play. Let’s see…a basketball game that has really great graphics, but requires me to shoot the ball through some combination of button presses and joystick movements….or a basketball game that lets me shoot the ball using a throwing motion via the “joystick”. I think the latter case takes the prize as an example of innovation.

It seems obvious now that the people who worked on the PS3 were obsessed with the machine: it’s got great graphics, I’m sure it’s powerful as heck, and it’s got all the technical features which say “next generation console”. But somewhere along the line they forgot that humans interface with this amazing machine. If anything, the phenomenal response to the Wii by all ages is a sign of how starved people are for unique interactions with what we might consider everyday devices.

While it’s certainly too soon to tell, it very well may be that the Wii has ushered in a new era of interaction. As we all know, economics consists of a dynamic between supply and demand, and until this moment I think there has been an abundance of supply (concepts for new interactions with electronic devices, for example) without a clear sense of the potential demand for that supply. The Wii justifies Nintendo’s efforts and it justifies our efforts as interaction designers. Demand does exist. People are excited by new, compelling interactions. Products and services can be successfully differentiated through the quality of their interactions.

After this evening, I think that Sony has found itself walking down the well-trodden path of conventional wisdom, only to find that their map’s a few years out of date. I think the same fate befell Microsoft, although I think they view the new X-Box differently than Sony views its PS3.

I predict that things are going to get interesting in the field of interaction design once these companies (and others) realize exactly what they’re missing! And even if it takes them a long time, the people have been woken, their curiosity piqued, their desires given form.

It’s an interesting time to be an interaction designer…