Sustainability & The Human Experience (Hx)

“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.”

A powerful satetement was made by food writer Michael Pollan at a PopTech Conference last October and an arresting illustratration of how consuming meat impacts climate change.I thought about Pollan’s statement a little more, in light of the perception that Hummer loyalists have of themselves. I wrote about this earlier, but a study has found that people who drive Hummers see themselves as defending virtues such as American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, love of the frontier, community and freedom.  Traditional American cuisine is meat heavy; consider burgers, hot dogs, sausage and eggs and bar-b-q. Frankly, I think it would be nigh near impossible to find a vegeterian among the Hummer crown, much less a vegan.

Unfortunately, Pollan retracted his statement after two University of Chicago scientists refuted his statements. Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin discovered that “a heavy meat-eater diet creates about two tons more carbon dioxide per year than does a vegan diet. Furthermore, they compared the carbon footprints of the Toyota Prius and the Chevy Suburban (similar mileage to a Hummer) and concluded a difference of about 4.67 tons per year.”

 Eshel, who is a proponent of environmentalism, softened his criticism of Pollan’s analogy by stating that “you cannot be an environmentalist, you can’t even remotely claim to be anything but a selfish lunatic if you drive a Hummer.”

It appears that one can be a meat-eater and an environmentalist provided extra effort is made in other aspects of life, like not driving gas guzzlers.

I came across, via adaptive path, a WSJ article outlining a speech the former Secretary of Defense made to a hotelier conference in DC last Nov.  He charmingly griped about the technical expertise needed to set a radio clock and difficulty of reading the tiny type on shampoo and conditioner labels.  More below:

• “I don’t want to go to astronaut training to figure out how to set a clock radio…I’m only there for the night. All I want to do is be awakened in the morning by the clock radio. I don’t want to fly it.”

• He also suggested making the type on shampoo and conditioner labels larger for older guests. “More than once I have (accidentally) used skin lotion,” he said.

• He advised making electrical outlets easier to reach from atop each room’s desk so that older guests needn’t crawl around looking for outlets under the desk.

Pretty good usability suggestions, especially from the perspective of an older guest.

The financial and business press has been inundated with the news of Dubai’s financial woes these past several weeks.

To recap, Dubai, a tiny city-state in the Gulf that’s part of the federation of the United Arab Emirates, stated that it would delay repayments on approximately $60 billion of debt from its investment arm Dubai World. This is a fancy way of saying that Dubai World was defaulting on its debt. Investors were spooked and markets gyrated, although they’ve stabilized since then.

How did Dubai achieve such prominence in the first place? Despite being located in the Gulf, Dubai does not have the oil reserves of its neighbours. It only produced 240,000 barrels of oil per day as compared to its bigger conservative cousin, Abu-Dhabi, which produces 2.7 million barrels a day. The rulers of Dubai sought to diversify their economy by transforming their city into a trading, financial and tourism center to rival that of Hong Kong and Singapore. This led to massive property development, with a focus on building extravagant luxury buildings, man-made palm-shaped islands and indoor ski slopes, to name a few. All this was done using leverage, with the Dubai at one point owing 107% of its GDP by financing these projects with international borrowing. This, as the past few weeks have shown, was financially unsustainable, especially when the government refused to guarantee the debt of DubaiWorld.

Along with financial unsustainability, the hyper-development and rate of growth of the city-state made it more and more ecologically unsustainable as well. Developers in Dubai, conscious of trends towards sustainable development, made it a point to include green practices when discussing their projects but the nature of actual developments themselves, for e.g. building an indoor ski slope in the desert and excavating the ocean to build a palm shaped island, rendered these practices irrelevant. Johann Hari from the Independent pointed out that:

The Tiger Woods Gold Course needs 4 million gallons of water every day, otherwise the grass, which is not indigenous to the desert, would wither and die. Other golf courses were transformed from sand to grass courses and use on average 1 million gallons of water a day.

Desalination (stripping sea water of salt to make it drinkable) costs more than oil to produce and produced large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

Dubai residents have the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being, more than twice that of an American.

As Kem outlined in a previous post, a lack of energy efficiency as principle of design can be noted in the outcome of a majority of Dubai developments. However, energy efficiency is rendered irrelevant when juxtaposing the nature of the developments and the environment they’re built on, i.e. an arid desert with not much freshwater.

One of the unintended consequences of the credit bust in Dubai, and elsewhere, is a corresponding decrease in greenhouse emissions due to halted development. That likely will not last long as economies slowly recover and the cycle of building and development starts over again unless true sustainable practices are included in the strategic vision of the city-state’s growth.

I have been delinquent in the last week as my real life  has taken precedence over my virtual life, leaving little time to blog.  But I am back.

In the meantime I was, however able to pen an article for JohnnyHolland on Ux and Sustainability.

In this present post I continue my thought on how to advance a Ux framework for understanding what it means for a design to be ‘good?”  The last two posts of this series have been interjected with two wonderful posts on the Hummer and the issue of energy - a welcome illustration of the second of the dimensions of this series, Energy.  Previous to the Hummer post,  I had began looking at Dimension of Sustainable Design with Durability & Energy as the first and second of the Dimensions, respectively. I continue here with the third: Labeling & Packaging.

In the first two posts I had not thought of laying out specific questions that needed to be considered and plan to add an addendum later. In this post I will layout the key aspects of the Dimension for better application for those who wish to use it in their current practices.

For many in the field of design ‘packaging and labeling” is a very tangible aspect of design that illustrates with minimum effort what it means to be sustainable in the context of design. This is perhaps because there are aspects with a higher visceral quality.

Packaging is the process of enclosing and protecting a product for the purposes of storage, distribution, sale, and use. It refers to the process of design, evaluation, and production.

Labeling goes hand-in-hand with packaging and is the written and visual element on packaging that serves the purpose of product identification, name tags, advertising, warnings, as well as other communication.

At first when I thought about these elements they existed separately. However I have combined them here as it is difficult to think of one without the other. In the context of Ux,  I am proposing 7 key aspects that need to be taken into account if we are to consider Sustainable Ux assessment as part of a future process. They are as follows:

1. Are labels easily understood by the consumers of the product or codified in esoteric language that only a few can understand? In other words: are they user friendly?
2. Are the labels true in representation, if special designations are used?  For example: is it really organic, free trade, smart health, certified or energy efficient if stated so?
3. If not part of the brand colour? Are there visual labeling and packaging manipulations to make users believe something is green when it is not? For example is the packaging green for the purpose of deception (greenwashed)?
4. Can the product be packaged in more concentrated from to lessen the amount of packaging and cost of transportation?
5. Are the packaging materials safe?
6. Do the packaging materials preserve the integrity of the product for locations that are further along on the transportation line?
7. Is the packaging recyclable? Reuseable?

In addressing these aspects of Packaging and Labeling,  Ux practitioners should be thinking about how to infuse their standard offering with findings that address some, if not all of these aspects,  wherever possible. Please revisit when I will be addressing the Dimension of Product Design and Communication

As far as vehicles and user perception go, the Hummer generates strong feelings, both from owners and non-owners. I recall reading an interesting article in the NYTimes about the gap in perception that arises between the Hummers owners and everyone else when forced to share the road.

“Hummer loyalists come across as a beleaguered lot…Hummer drivers position their ownership at the center of a ‘brand-mediated moral conflict’ in which Hummer enthusiasts are not only innocent but also heroic. Conflict with vehement critics turns out to play a key role, with the Hummer owner casting himself or herself as a ‘moral protagonist’who must, according to this theory, ‘defend sacrosanct virtues and ideals from the transgressive actions of an immoral adversary.’ And what sacrosanct virtues would those be? To oversimplify a bit: American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, love of the frontier, community and freedom.”

Indeed!

Below is a chart from Forrester illustrating segments and percentages of the population willing to adopt green solutions. I think we would be safe to say that owners of the Hummers would be in 44% segment of non-green users.

Changing attitudes towards sustainability when it conflicts with consumers values and perceptions, such as the Hummer owners, would be considered a downright Sisyphean task.

So how can this reluctant segment of the population change?  The motivation would have to be externally driven, versus internally generated. As the hypothetical owner of a Hummer, I might not care about the carbon footprint of my vehicle but I might drive less if gas prices go sky high again, which would make an impact considering the Hummer’s poor gas mileage (estimated to be 9 mpg).

Another external driver that might drive change in behaviour would be government intervention. Due to a loophole, Hummer owners in the US can get a tax-write off of up to $100,000 as a business expense. Removing the unfair loop hole can change behaviour towards selecting a more sustainable choice. In addition, due to weight classifications, the Hummer and other large SUVs are exempt from meeting any emission standards. A simple reversal of this absurdly unfair rule can do a lot to motivate owners, and potential owners, to switch to a more sustainable vehicle.

Note that these sort of external drivers would also work with the other segments of the population that is more amenable to green solutions as well. With the exception of the early adopters, the push to use sustainable solutions and products usually are harnessed with another factor such as economics (cheaper to use this green detergent) or efficiency/usability.