Literature Reviews

(Ongoing)

Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson

Thompson places objects (everything from Victorian era woven silk pictures to slum housing) into one of three categories: transient, meaning that they possess a finite lifespan and decrease in value over time; durable, meaning they have supposedly infinite lifespans and increase in value over time; and rubbish, the intermediary stage between the previous two categories in which objects have no value at all. He argues that any object’s value is socially constructed and therefore the formation and maintenance of the boundaries between categories is “socially malleable.” (28)

Food, by nature, would fall within Thompson’s transient categorization by way of its “inherent vice,” or as he describes it “a persistent backsliding tendency as a result of (its) physical properties.” (114) While the majority of Thompson’s exploration focuses on objects with comparatively long lifespans, (cars, homes, and Bakelite ash trays all enjoy a luxury of time that fruits and vegetables will likely never know,) the underlying principle of value as an imposed rather than intrinsic quality supports an intervention with the goal of altering consumers’ mindsets.

“What an awesome pit opens up into the hitherto firm terrain of understanding if we admit that perhaps all these years we’ve had things the wrong way round and that really instead of examining the eternal and unchanging, we should have been studying the erratic flutterings of the butterfly of taste!” (54)

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton

In this philosophical exploration of ecological theory, Timothy Morton introduces the concept of the hyperobject — an object or phenomenon so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” that it alludes our understanding. Morton outlines a series of properties that characterize all hyperobjects, stating that they are all: viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased, and interobjective. For the purposes of this investigation, two of these traits — nonlocality and interobjectivity — are particularly poignant.

Nonlocality: While we experience the local effects of global warming on a daily basis, its sheer scale makes the totality incomprehensible. In this way, the hyperobject cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts.

Interobjectivity: Our understanding of hyperobjects is dependent on and mediated by its relation to other objects — for example, the sound of the wind rustling through a bamboo forest is not, in fact, the sound of the wind, but the sound of the wind interacting with the bamboo. As such, what we perceive of a hyperobject is merely an index of the object, rather than the object itself.

This text provides a useful theoretical lens through which the problem of food waste can be considered. By delving into the philosophical implications of today’s prevailing worldview — that individuals are somehow separate from the collective — Morton identifies some of the psychological obstacles to be overcome in creating an ecological mindset. Consequently, this opens up a potential approach to reducing food waste: by strategically reframing an otherwise “invisible” issue as a systemic problem in which each individual has their own role to play, we might encourage habit change and therefore lessen environmental harm.

Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows

One section focuses on what’s known as the Tragedy of the Commons, a concept employed in the social sciences to explain the overexploitation of shared resources. Meadows asserts that “the tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.” (117) This means that while individuals benefit immediately from behaviors that erode the common resources (e.g. the continued use of fossil fuels), they share the burden of long-term effects, causing a dilution of consequence and weakening feedback signals. According to Meadows, “tragedy can lurk not only in the use of common resources, but also in the use of common sinks” (118)

This concept is pivotal in the overall trajectory of this study, and its value is twofold: first, it provides a sociological foundation for the ecological divide identified in the following section, and second, it neatly encapsulates a first step — so to speak — in overcoming that divide to promote more sustainable behaviors. It suggests that by strengthening the naturally weak feedback loops between individual and collective, designers might be able to lessen the erosion of common resources and reduce environmental harm.

Emotionally Durable Design, Jonathan Chapman

Echoing the sentiments expressed by Morton in Hyperobjects, Chapman identifies a disconnect between humankind and the natural world as one of the driving forces in our modern culture of excessive waste.

“In seeing ourselves as beyond this ‘ecological consciousness’, we have broken partnership with the biosphere, developing alien practices, processes, materials and lifestyles that far exceed the Earth’s regenerative capacities.” (5)

He goes on to assert that while the prevailing patterns of interaction prioritize speed, efficiency, and convenience — a trend which effectively “alleviates” the need for users to engage in the decision-making process — this needn’t be the case. He posits that it’s “the subtle and more ephemeral user experiences that penetrate the psyche through the slow and steady passing of time” (87) and therefore possess the potential for fostering the deep emotional connections he believes are crucial for reshaping our consumptive behaviors. These “fuzzy” interfaces present users with the challenge of understanding and mastering their use over time, a process which builds a bond between human and object in which both evolve simultaneously.

As was the case in the previous analysis of Rubbish Theory, applying the analytical principles often reserved for more conventional consumer goods to food requires a bit of mental reframing; as most food items have a relatively short lifespan, the task of developing an emotionally durable connection with an apple may be challenging. However, I intend to explore the ways in which we might build durable connections with the food waste data itself as a way of challenging existing habits and restoring ecological consciousness.

“New genres of design must develop — beyond the centralized world of lighter, faster, smarter — which adopt a more critical stance, creating challenging and provocative portrayals of the future, delivering numerous conflicting projections of tomorrow, which through their existence illustrate that there is more than one way to live your life.” (140)

Speculative Everything, Dunne & Raby

In addition to providing a collection of speculative design projects for reference and inspiration, Dunne and Raby illustrate the role of critical design in challenging the status quo. To address some of the most common criticisms levelled against speculative design practice, they assert that the goal of design fiction is not to “solve problems” in the traditional sense, but to raise questions that might otherwise go unasked. The true value of these speculative “probes” is in their ability to provoke thought, facilitate conversation, and support reflection rather than to simply fill a need. Holding fast to the idea that this type of design aims to influence consciousness, the authors also emphasize the importance of free will in speculative design and maintain that more subversive methods of encouraging behavior change (“nudging”) unfairly limit individual agency. As such, these design fictions can be leveraged to present completely alternate realities, therefore catalyzing and motivating change rather than imposing it.

This text again provides a conceptual lens through which the overarching problem identified in this study might be considered. A speculative approach not only allows for experimentation in a deeply complex space, but also acknowledges that perhaps the only way to overcome society’s most wicked problems is not by fixing them as we feel compelled to do, but “by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior.” (2) The collection of projects presented (as well as the accompanying narrative) underscore the potential inherent in the creation of design fiction to alter perceptions and disrupt prevailing modes of thought.

“Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes but not just for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. Darkness as an antidote to naive techno-utopianism can jolt people into action. In design, darkness creates a frisson that excites and challenges. It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.” (38)

Design Futuring, Tony Fry

Throughout Design Futuring, Tony Fry argues that a fundamental shift in our modes of living and dwelling are not only desirable, but necessary for our long-term sustainment on Earth. He argues that to strive for anything less than holistic change — redirection in not only behavior but also thought — would be dangerously insufficient; “to simply deal with problems as they arrive would be myopic in the extreme.” (173) To this end, we must rethink and reshape our relationship with technology, prioritizing its ability to aid us in doing what is right, rather than doing what comes easily.

“The challenge before us now is how we can induce and maintain sufficient ‘alienation’ to negotiate new relations with technology that are more sustainable. This does not simply mean more environmental technologies, but rather, the arrival of a level of technological literacy within a regime of ‘design intelligence’ based on responsibility rather than mastery.” (187)

The rhetoric presented in Design Futuring underscores the importance of “redirective” design practice — an approach Fry describes as “ more radical than reform but less disruptive than revolution” — as a societal step towards establishing more sustainable futures. According to Fry, “redirection is a process of establishing new signposting systems that first indicate the error of following those existing pathways of thought and action as they serve to defuture all that is vital for viable futures.” (11) What’s more, he advocates for the elucidation of consequence as a first step towards the development of “sustainable” practice, acknowledging “human action will always be destructive; there is, however, an enormous divide between not knowing and knowing this fact and thereafter making critical decisions in the light of this knowledge.” (201) He even goes so far as to assert that a bit of “pain” (in the psychological sense) might be necessary for these transformations to occur:

“we do not feel our unsustainability beyond occasional touches of guilt as we fill-up our car’s fuel tank, look at the contents of our supermarket trolley or check-in at the airport for a flight we really can’t justify. Certainly, few of us feel the tyranny of our human centeredness. But we have to — being unsustainable has to hurt.” (247)

Ambient influence: can twinkly lights lure and abstract representations trigger behavior change?

In an effort to demonstrate the potential impact of ambient information on decision-making, the authors of this study designed and tested three visualizations; two were highly abstract representations (twinkling lights guiding people to use the stairs and a constellation of spheres that depicted stair usage vs elevator usage), and the third employed more “traditional” modes of visualizing data (pie charts on a public screen.) After installing these three interventions in an office building, they found that the abstract representations were far more successful in capturing attention and piquing curiosity than the “traditional” display, however these visualizations also caused greater levels of confusion and led to more misinterpretation than the more familiar forms of a pie chart. The investigation also revealed that while study participants exhibited significant changes in behavior after being exposed to ambient displays, they were predominantly unaware of these changes, indicating the displays worked primarily on an unconscious level.

The benefits of using abstract representations include being impersonal, not prescriptive or judgmental…However, the downside of abstractness is its potential ambiguity, where it may not be obvious to someone what the representation means and they abscribe a completely different meaning.” (5)

This study is particularly interesting for its evaluative data. It provides self-reported information surrounding behavior as compared to actual behavior and reveals a gap between the two, implying that the displays successfully affected behavior, but did so on an unconscious level. This would suggest that ambient displays might be “best” suited for influencing behavior in a more passive capacity, rather than striving for constant, explicit engagement.

Slow Technology: Designing for Reflection, Lars Hallnas & Johan Redstrom

Hallnas and Redstrom briefly cover the rise of calm technology and ambient displays as a means of making human life more efficient without demanding full user attention before addressing the notion of slow technology directly. Slow technology, unlike “fast” technology that allows us pure efficiency, involves the deliberate “slowness in learning, understanding and presence” as a means of encouraging a user to pause and reflect. This is not to say that slow technology is unproductive, as an object might encourage reflection by aesthetic means while also acting as an effective tool, spurring the user to alternate between slow and fast perspectives while engaging with the object. Slow technology doesn’t endeavor to make technology invisible, rather it exposes itself in a way that encourages users to consider and reflect on its presence. Formally, this manifests as an “amplification” of presence and a “complete” expression of the object.

“the distinction between fast and slow technology is not a distinction in terms of time perception; it is a metaphorical distinction that has to do with time presence. When we use a thing as an efficient tool time disappears, ie.g. we get things done. Accepting an invitation for reflection inherent in the design means on the other hand that time will appear, i.e. we open up for time presence.”

This piece provides a thorough encapsulation of slow technology as an approach to encouraging reflection and therefore useful insights into the potential advantages and pitfalls of such a method in the context of food waste reduction. As the authors indicate, the principles of slow technology are perhaps most effectively applied when encouraging contemplation of our day-to-day interactions with technology itself rather than reflection on, say, our relationship with food, and therefore may not be appropriate for this study. However, the authors do speak to a few general “guidelines” for designing slow technology — for example, they advise that designers maintain material simplicity so as to invite more careful and focused consideration on an object’s form — which may prove useful should I choose to employ principles of slow design.

Drawing energy: Exploring perceptions of the invisible, Flora Bowden, Dan Lockton, Rama Gheerawo, Clare Brass

When asked to draw in response to the question “what does energy look like?” participants produced a wide variety of representations that illustrate a broad spectrum of thought. Placed loosely into categories, the visualizations took on the following themes: nature/culture, abstraction, process, and other. Depictions of nature and/or culture tended to illustrate the “points of contact” (25) between people and energy, including lightbulbs and WiFi as well as more natural emblems like the sun. More abstract representations centered around evoking the nature of energy itself (form, color, etc.), rather than the tangible objects we associate with its production or use. Some participants chose to create “records of the energy”(29) rather than representations, allowing the materials to take shape simply as evidence of the production process. Finally, there were visual responses that fell outside of these neat groupings — particularly those that addressed “energy” more as an emotional quality than a physical resource. None of the representations, however, included numerical quantities, highlighting the disparity between how we understand energy and how its use is conveyed to us.

Drawing Energy provides a rich data set upon which I intend to expand in the initial phase of my own exploration. The subsequent analysis of this data and the categorizations formed will also serve as a reference for corroborating (or departing from) any patterns that emerge in my own data. Descriptions of the research process also provide valuable insight as to methods for effectively structuring workshop sessions. I plan to follow up with Dan Lockton in an effort to solidify a protocol for my own investigation into mental models, drawing from his experience on the project.

“Exploring Ambient and Artistic Visualization for Residential Energy Use Feedback,” Johnny Rodgers and Lyn Bartram

As sustainability and resource consumption become increasingly urgent concerns, the need for comprehensible feedback in our everyday lives also grows. Tools including the Microsoft Hohm and Google PowerMeter have emerged (and since disappeared) to meet this need, but largely relied on common representations like bar graphs and pie charts. While these traditional modes of data visualization typically allow viewers to understand a data set, they often fail to inspire emotional engagement. More artistic modes of representation, however, are better positioned to leverage aesthetics and dynamism to capture attention. Further, ambient displays have the capacity to move in and out of a viewer’s consciousness — alternately standing out from and blending into their environments — and allowing them to be “lived with rather than used.” (pg. 2490) As such, the intersection of ambient and artistic displays have the potential to deliver meaningful and intuitive feedback at the places and times they’re needed most.

This source provides conceptual support for the development of ambient and artistic visualization methods, laying out — at a high level — the advantages of such an approach in sparking engagement. It also serves as a valuable reference in the process of producing a framework against which to evaluate future design concepts by outlining specific parameters used by the authors in gauging the success of their own visualizations. As for the study itself, participants’ comprehension of their energy usage was tested both up front and after seeing the authors designs, and the results from each portion of the study provide their own unique insights. In the initial phase, respondents relayed their understanding of traditional energy usage representations (a screenshot from the Google PowerMeter and an energy bill) and the results showed comprehension to be low, further underscoring the gap between current methodology and true understanding. Further, the range of responses evoked by the “alternative” visualization methods presented in the study reinforces the need for an open-minded and pluralist approach in my own investigation.

Towards Designing Persuasive Ambient Visualization, Andrew Vande Moere

Recent trends in data representation— including ambient, ubiquitous, and persuasive visualization — have opened new avenues for surfacing otherwise unseen information and influencing user action. Ambient visualizations that employ metaphor have the power to inspire deeper engagement, revealing further layers of information as the user invests greater time and attention. Ubiquitous ambient displays in particular further enable users to receive information at critical moments, allowing them to make informed decisions with less mental overhead. Thus, while traditional data visualization is often used solely as a means of transmitting information, ambient displays can be leveraged to convey larger, more subjective messages and by focusing on the higher-level concepts underlying the data, these displays have the power to encourage shifts in attitude and behavior.

“Such displays utilize data to justify the relevance and significance of the representation by focusing on the meaning of the data, instead of detecting any patterns hidden inside it.”

This text provides insight as to potential strategies for conveying data with the purpose of encouraging behavior change, enumerating a series of related approaches. Vande Moere, however, also surfaces an important consideration in the process of evaluating these strategies. He points out that the metrics currently available for measuring the long-term effects of persuasive visualizations are insufficient as techniques that rely on self-reporting and reflection are notoriously unreliable given relatively low participant compliance and objectivity.

“a persuasive visualization is different from an ambient visualization in that people need to rely on and trust the information shown, so that they are willing to alter their behavior.”