A friend of mine, just sent me an important and intriguing work about sustainability, which triggers me to write this post to share some of my thoughts.

The Story of Stuff - with Annie Leonard
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Sustainability, well, this is usually the thing that industrial designers feel like there are prickles down the back. It is usually perceived that engineers can far more better than us to work on this issue, at least they are more piratical than us in a way.

Interestingly, some Taiwanese friends of mine studying at Design Academy Eindhoven had also got this topic to work on and found it is really difficult to position a designer in the cycle of a ecologically sustainable system, whereas you might agree with me, the way they design is rather artistic-based - which is good because they are extremely good at sending messages to people, but for us, interaction designers, are we also good at contributing to this?

We are trained to be good "system" designers, how and what can we do to contribute designs based on "10 Little and Big Things You Can Do" as Annie points out on her website? or even improve it? Does the thinking behind designing an interactive system has values to this? or we are still like "value is rated by consumption"?

While nowadays we talk a lot about designing intelligent products and systems, almost every time when I want to start up a project I encounter a question and ask myself "Am I here just asking and convincing people to buy a product with a function they are already able to do and have?", alright, I admit that it seems that an industrial designer should not think too much like this, especially in this consumerism and material world. Indeed, we can work on emotional design or explore more possibilities of creating things by interactive technologies, even in a "magic" sense as Kees Overbeeke pointed out. But how does this fit to the world which becomes more and more (finally) aware of environments?

To quickly sum up here, I am asking, if a product is "intelligentized", don't you think it should also be sustainablely "intelligent" and reflect on its function, appearance and interaction..etc? (either ecologically, economically or socially sustainble)

Related links

PlayPump
http://www.playpumps.org/

Kees Overbeeke - The Aesthetics of the Impossible
http://alexandria.tue.nl/extra2/redes/Overbeeke2007.pdf

Next Nature
http://www.nextnature.net/

NAT, designing nature - OTHER THINGS
http://www.mu.nl/

Natural Capitalism-Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
http://www.natcap.org/