Sustainable design? Why?

Before coming here I didn’t know anything about sustainable design, and I never thought that this was related with interaction design. But, to be honest, is great to have studied this. I feel better thinking in solutions for a better world than thinking only in cool interfaces.

At the beginning we learned that we live like we had three planets Earth. I mean, “we” the occidentals. There are some calculations about what the earth can produce and what everyone consumes. If we divide the amount of space in the earth between the inhabitants. And we relate this two measures, is possible to know approximately how much “space” do we have for everyone: what is called the ecological footprint

The fact is that, more or less, since 2008 we are using more resources than the earth, as a whole, can regenerate. This means that our society is not sustainable. Furthermore, not the whole world contributes in the same way to this global footprint. According to these calculations if all the world would live like the developed countries, three earths would be need. It seems pretty egoist, we consume more than it’s possible and 2/3rd of world’s population are not even well-developed.

But as we are a smart society, we are not going to tolerate that, do we? So, let’s ask how can we build a sustainable society.
That means, to achieve certain amount of wellness consuming as few recurses as possible, so we let space in the earth to the poor countries in order to not stop their development and show them a sustainable example that don’t replicate what we’ve been doing before. I think it sounds quite reasonable. Is not hippie fantasy chat.

But, poor European man, you still want to use your car everyday to go to work, you want to drive to the sopping mall. You want to eat meat twice a day, you think you need a lot of stuff in your house to be happy, and you still say that you are environmentally concerned because you recycle the newspaper.

Let’s try to design a better society. There is no recipes. So we need to try and fail a few times.

next: Sustainable everyday.