Thread of ecological instability in digital product design (more like a tiny manifesto):
Conversation
1/ Industry situates designers in context of “user needs.” But, it is necessary for designers to work more critically, to observe these infrastructures and rethink how we are participate in them to completely rethink the discipline, especially in current global ecological crisis.
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2/ As designers we oftentimes think about costs of features, but oftentimes we are not trained to critically think about the environmental costs. The digital production is the fundamental source of designer’s legacy, but equally so is the contribution to our physical environment.
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3/The semantics about the materiality of the internet has to change because awareness is critical. The internet is not just an arbitrary cloud, but a system of textured objects — data centers, wires, cables - the whole infrastructure that is taken for granted on a daily basis.
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4/ The industry has provided us with opportunities to create short-term interventions in the form of building products. But, it limits the scale upon which designers operate, or rather acontectualizes them from broader complexities (it is unsustainable).
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5/ Therefore, long-term and visionary interventions are needed for designers to critically think about low-impact interfaces, geopolitics of interfaces, workplace politics, and ecological materiality of digital interactions.
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6/ For example, somehow we don’t treat interfaces as netizens to tackle digital carbon footprints. Neither industry asks us to address environmental responsibility, politics, inequality, and other issues arising from design’s complicity across various disciplines and cultures.
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7/ In STS, one of the Bruno Latour’s theories assumes that there is a constant stability to perform design interventions and knowledge production. But because of the current climate crisis, we can’t rely on this underlying assumption — the earth is not stable anymore.
Replying to
8/ As I am developing a more coherent argument, i think a fundamental shift on how we look at digital production is needed. How urban design of computing / “software as cities” types of thinking can help design to operate across multiple scales for more sustainable interventions.
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