A Sustainable Train of Thought

I ultimately moved away from working specifically on this area for my thesis, but I found Guiding Principles for Sustainable Transportation from an entry in the ClimateBiz newsletter during some research and thought it would be worthwhile posting it. The article has quite a few other sustainable transportation resources. What’s interesting to me is the order of principles: Access, People and Communities, Environmental Quality, and Economic Viability. Not your usual order of operations, so to speak.

Switching gears, Throwplace is a web site where businesses and individuals can list for donation excess inventory or unwanted objects and other businesses, charities, and people can get them either for free or for a fee. I find Throwplace interesting because it’s a marketplace enabler, similar to Craigslist or eBay, but with a different mandate.

Some other reputation management systems:

• Opinity
• iKarma

So far all the management systems I’ve seen focus mainly on online transactions. The Rapleaf blog mentions offline transactions, as does this article in SiliconBeat, but I’m not sure how they actually handle them. According to the article you have to go to the website and engage in a rating process which takes place online, complete with emails. Another aspect of the service that comes through from the description is that it’s more about judging transactions and not the use of objects. The example they use is selling and buying U2 tickets. I think that looking at these offerings will help me focus and get more particular with my thesis.

Didier pointed out Rapleaf to me today. It’s a reputation management system which is further detailed in an article on TechCrunch, as the actual service isn’t publicly available online yet.

The basic concept is the same as what we produced for the Applied Dream —trust and reputation built up between individuals—but it seems they are taking a web-based approach to their transaction management system, which is arguably more practical and “today” than a spime-based world (which for obvious reasons doesn’t exist at the moment). Obviously this impacts my thesis topic now, but I think there’s room to maneuver in terms of the actual off-line interactions and how people build and assess reputation.

Businessweek’s article The Top Ten Hybrid Myths contains a point which I’ve made several times before:

The car you drive sends a powerful message about who you are and what you think about the world. Hybrid drivers take pride in letting other drivers—especially those behind the wheel of gas guzzlers—know that getting from point A to point B doesn’t have to lead us to an uncertain environmental and economic future.

The article has several other points: your choice of vehicle can be tied to national security, political partisanship should be a non-issue regarding hybrid car use, and hybrids are only a partial solution, among others.

While none of the points the article raises are particularly new, I find it interesting that Businessweek is choosing to publish this kind of article, considering it’s more of a mainstream news source.

Amazon.com uses reputation in weighting reviews that people submit, giving “higher quality” work greater prominence on the site.

So how do they determine quality and reputation? Good question.

We also look at who authored the content. If the author has a strong reputation (the product of community feedback about the author’s past works), it’s likely his or her new work is of high quality.

Past reviews contribute to the assumed quality of the present work, although I don’t see any mention of time in their calculations.

What is my reputation? Your reputation is based on the Community’s assessment of your activity (e.g. content you have authored) at Amazon.com. Positive votes on your content will improve your reputation.

An additional aspect to their reputation calculation is the concept of Real Name™ attribution. In essence, you make public your real name (based on the name used on your credit card) and this type of honesty positively weights your recommendations. In essence, revealing your true name is seen as a statement that you stand by what you have written.

More interestingly, though:

Sometimes we have very little information about a piece of content because the author is relatively new and/or because there are few votes on the content. This is where Real Name™ attributions come in.

So an additional property of a Real Name™ is that it helps newbies establish a reputation. In essence, it’s a step you can take for free that immediately puts you on good footing for future recommendations and transactions. I suppose that for a newbie it speaks of intentionality and interest in participating, but there is another aspect of fracturing identity within Amazon which I’m not so sure about. I like the idea of a “free” step, but I’m not sure I like how it can potentially penalize people who don’t take that step.

“Third spaces” aren’t something I’ve really talked about or looked at during the course of my thesis work, but this article in the NYTimes about Paragraph and other writer’s spaces caught my eye. Paragraph is essentially a member’s-only space where writers can go to write.

Ms. Parisi compares writers’ rooms to gyms. In both, a large group of people share the same equipment. And, paying for membership helps writers take their commitment to writing seriously, she said, and gets them “off of the couch” and onto the literary StairMaster.
As Ms. Manghnani, who writes short stories, explained: “If I’m at home working, people don’t respect that that much; they call or text or e-mail, or make arrangements to have coffee. But if I’m at a place that sounds legitimate to other people – a library or a writers’ room – they don’t disturb me as much. No one calls you at the gym and says, ‘Lets go have a burger.’ ”

I really like this analysis of commitments. People paying money to prove to themselves that they are serious about their task, and the appearance of that commitment to others: do they respect it and encourage it? I suppose it’s as much about the public perception of your status as it is your actual status. You could be a complete faker or even just someone who is coasting along, but a membership affords you a certain amount of respect and heads off some questions which might otherwise be asked. You might be writing or you might not be. But the point is that you’ve entered into a mutual agreement of sorts with others regarding the meaning of your membership. It’s a symbol.

Perhaps it’s even a brand. But in this case it’s one with a clause: you have to write to belong. Once we consider time in this equation, then it’s clear that if you’re a faker, or you’re not really working, you will lose your membership. (A gym, on the other hand, is all too happy to let you aimlessly wander amongst the machines and weight stacks for as long as you want, provided you keep paying your membership dues.) So the brand in this case is one which becomes coveted because it has real meaning. Anyone can buy a certain pair of sneakers given enough money. But not everyone can be part of a writer’s room, because you are required to participate, contribute, produce. The agreement you make with the brand and your participation in its realization and fulfillment is a critical part of the brand’s meaning. A self-policing process is required to ensure its continued integrity.

The other part of the article which caught my attention:

...playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, a member of the Brooklyn space, says he finds the atmosphere bracing. “I think writers get jazzed by writing in a room with other writers,” he said. “Writing is a very competitive art.”

I think the same applies to designers in close confines…

During my last review, Alex mentioned tipping points in relationship to some of the concepts I presented. Malcolm Gladwell discusses tipping points as the moment when mass in a system shifts.

The relationship to sustainability is that you don’t have to convince each and every person of the merits of sustainability. Rather, if you can reach the tipping point for a system, then once the system changes, everyone has to go along with it. As an example, if enough people (say, 51%) petition for a bus schedule to change, then the other 49% are going to use that system regardless of whether they wanted that system of not.

Clearly, this is both a good and bad thing. But in this case I’d like to look at the positive side, which is that by reaching that tipping point (which is comparatively easier to do than changing the entire system), we can effect large-scale change relatively easily. I wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of tipping points, but in retrospect I think this was what I was trying to achieve by framing my concept around the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

The US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and tipping points are similar in that through their implementation they both preempt certain discussions. The hard-core constituencies which would fight tooth and nail against implementing certain resolutions or achieving critical mass become less of a concern because in the end it’s the implementation which matters. Once a system is in place, it becomes both harder to argue against it and harder to resist.

Thinking this way gets me out of the morass of trying to shift an entire society over to new systems and ways of thinking. Now it’s just a matter of shifting the right people, or piggybacking on the best opportunities.

I originally read The Tipping Point last year while working on the service design project, and I found it really helped my approach at the time. So all of this came back to me while I was reading this article in GreenBiz about investors who are filing shareholder resolutions to investigate corporate energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. The connection to the above? It’s not about ALL shareholders filing these resolutions…it’s about enough shareholders filing. Granted these resolutions are largely on behalf of large institutional investors, but it doesn’t really change the point: get enough of the right people to effect change, and the rest will follow.

Quick post…

Reminiscent of some scenarios which I first described last December for my second review, RecycleBank pays you to recycle. In return for recycling, you get RecycleBank Dollars which you can spend at “participating retailers”. As it states in the FAQ section, “RecycleBank generates revenue by helping cities avoid landfill disposal fees.”

The New York Times was running an article on RecycleBank, but it’s since disappeared into the depths of the Grey Lady’s archives. If you want to pay $3.95, you can read it too…

The only thing I’m uncomfortable with is the extremely unabashed message of “recycling = access to shopping” as advertised throughout the site. Responsible consumption is just as important as responsible recycling, particularly because considered choices at the moment of purchase can ultimately reduce the need for recycling in the first place.

But if you’re a company which makes its money off of recycling materials, then of course you’re not going to be encouraging your customers to exercise restraint when purchasing things.

The Design Council publication Red Paper 01 Health – Co-creating Services. This is where it all started for last year’s service design course. Most of what it proposes is rather common-sensical, I suppose, but then again that’s pretty much how I’ve always found interaction design.

The state of California recently released its Environmentally Preferable Purchases Best Practices Manual which gives advice and guidelines for purchasing products ranging from plastic trash bags to lumber to antifreeze.

Currently, this sort of database is aimed at professionals and builders, not the ordinary person. In an ideal world, this database would extend to all products and be available to all consumers as a step towards transforming the consumer to customer.