Missed Connections

The Interactive Community’s role in the sustainability movement is vital but cannot exist in a vacuum of lofty ideas.

Multitasking at panels and keynotes has become the norm, and South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) exhibits a particularly intense form of this behavior. It makes sense though, as this is a conference made up in large part by and for the very interaction designers who create all this multitasking software. Besides, there's so much updating, tweeting and micro-blogging to do that it's become half the fun of attending. And so in the vast, darkened presentation hall of the second keynote of SXSWi it wasn't surprising at all to see the electrically lit screens of the digerati dotting the landscape as they all did their thing during the speech. What struck me this time, however, was the relationship between what was being said on stage and what was being done on the screens of the audience.

The keynote speaker, Valerie Casey, founder of the Designer’s Accord (created during her tenure as a former creative director of frog design) gave a sermon on how the interaction designers and developers at SXSWi were going to be the leaders in helping to unravel the complexity of the sustainability crisis we find ourselves in. Her appeal that you don't have to “kill yourself to save the world,” but can instead actually DO something about it, hinged on framing the topic as a systems design problem. In this way, she asks us to consider the fact that sustainability won’t be achieved by simply making better material choices or pursuing more efficient manufacturing processes, but instead she asked us to view the issue as a vast interrelated web of feedback loops, affordances, triggers, and design traps to be remedied; the very tools and tasks of the interaction and software designer.

And that's when I caught a glance of the laptop in front of me. On it’s screen was the tell-tale sign of a coder hard at work — a cascading tree of indented lines, the rapid back and forth between code and the app being made. Here was one of those very interactive and software designers that Casey was commanding on stage to join the movement and put their skills to work, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was…working. It put into sharp perspective the fact that it’s going to take more than impassioned salvos in conference halls about saving the world for interaction and software designers to pay attention.

Casey’s strongest rhetoric was delivered when she admonished the audience for a lack of participation in this movement and the various organizations the design community had established to fight the good fight (LEED, Sustainable Packaging, and her own Designer's Accord). And yet, to a fault, almost all of the examples and success stories she highlighted in her presentation were not borne of interactive or software designers but by systems designers. But that was out of necessity. In order to inspire her audience at SXSW Casey had to blend the difference between systems designers and interaction designers. Yes, interaction designers do in fact build systems, but their primary medium is software not hardware, and sustainability IS a hardware problem. Her pictures of children in e-waste sites and albatrosses carcasses embedded with plastic are shocking, but they will not be remedied with an app.. Put another way – what has twitter done for the environment?

Excessive waste and the thoughtless use of natural resources is too important a problem to mask with clever metaphors and calculated rhetoric. Interaction designers will indeed be “part of the solution, not the problem,” but the real leaders of the movement will be political, industrial, and infrastructural visionaries who have handles on the system.

If Casey’s speech motivated anyone in the crowd to put down their laptops and take their systems thinking skills into those domains and help those leaders, if not become them, then she succeeded. But as the lights came up and the crowd began to file out of the hall, I noticed the coder in front of me still hard at work compiling his app, oblivious to the empty seats around him. His laptop was still open. To that person I say, keep focusing on the work. I know I will.

Image from flickr user art_es_anna (cc)