UI Design and The Environment

I was having a chat with a friend yesterday in my favourite cafe, Cream. We got on to the topic of the environment, and it's future. How do us computer guys and gals (he is a web coder) affect the environment? What could we change about our industry? What's our impact on Global Warming?

The Positives
On the one hand, I can feel proud of the software industry, with it's trend to download-distribution, saving in the manufacture and disposal of bound paper stacks aka manuals and polycarbonate and aluminum discs, aka DVDs. Less waste = good.

Also, I believe communication tools like our own Skitch application and site may mean people have less need to travel in order to work with a colleague. Or perhaps travel to the office four days a week, rather than five. After all, my company has people working in Australia, Europe and America and we work with people in South America, Japan. And no office building on any continent.

The Negatives
But on the other, dirtier, hand, the Macbook I am typing this on will probably be replaced in 1, 2 or 3 years. And even in the broader community, aside from dedicated tasks, computers are not much good beyond 10 years, or less. Once deemed worthless, a computer's intermingled parts are incredibly difficult to recycle. Only in recent years have makers like Apple reduced their use of PCBs, heavy metals and other substances.

Looking Forward
Building better tools for people to communicate, and make more effective use of their time and travel seems environmentally sound. What else? How can I, and the people in my industry have a more positive environmental impact?

Some 'out there' brainstorming:

• Hide the Print feature
• Build virtual communication technologies into every application
• Have applications Sleep when not being used to save some CPU cycles
• Build applications which can run on low, and recycled computers
• Create software to help upcoming countries manage their manufacturing and agriculture industries better
• Build applications to help people manage their home electrical, water, heating and recycling needs
• Apply pressure to hardware manufacturers by allowing software to only run on 'environmentally certified' machines. DRM for the environment?
• Encourage game creators to write software which pools the communities effort like the ESP game, rather than disposing of it like Solitaire

Comments

[Vincent Gable]

http://vgable.com/blog/2009/02/19/sustainable-design/" rel="nofollow">Lovably-designed things aren't seen as disposable, so they stick around. Hopefully, just by making very good software, we can help people like their computer enough to hold on to it for another year.

Actually I'm not against the disposability per se. Computers have been getting more efficient, not just faster. Keeping a 10 year old computer on active duty is NOT a good thing, if it uses 10x more energy to write an email. But I don't know what exactly the right replacement timeframe is.

Good news: generally modern applications do sleep when not in use. Instead of burning energy checking for keystrokes, they don't do anything until the OS sends them events they care about.

[Keith Lang]

Thanks for the link Vincent — the best shave ever. :-)

[Vincent Gable]

Thanks Keith :-),

Two other things,

This reminds me very much of http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2009/03/role-of-real-technologists.html" rel="nofollow">this post, The Role of Real Technologists,

(technologists) don't tend to solve the most important problems directly. But we can make it easier for those that are solving the problems to do so. We create tools that increase efficiency, and that indeed may make new more effective approaches possible.

Unfortunately, I think "Build applications which can run on low, and recycled computers" is a dangerous plan if taken too far. It's just not possible to do many useful things on old computers. I'd rather see programmer time spent on building evolutionary tools than shoehorning old tools into inefficient machines. I think the right metric to optimize is "watt it takes to get a job done". Better software reduces work-time per job. Even if only 0.5% is shaved off every year by improved software, that's still exponential improvement.

This is all very good food for thought!

[Keith Lang]

This is a good point. Although, converse to my idea above, I've always believed that the human is the most expensive machine in the room, and hence optimizing any task that a human is involved in should pay the best dividends for energy resources.

Thanks again for your thoughts!

[Vance]

I'd say our biggest potential impact as technologists is to evangelize to non-technologists.

For example, teach your friends and family that computers should be "put to sleep" when they're not in use. That's an easy sell, because they can see the bottom line on their next electricity bill.

One clever approach that came to mind as I read this article, is http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/black_google_sa.php" rel="nofollow">Blackle.

By the way... glad to see you posting meaty articles again Keith. Your posts were thinning out there for a while.

[Keith Lang]

Thanks Vance — I'd not read about Blackle before. LCD monitors solve this issue.

re: meaty articles, I'm experimenting with short stuff as sometimes people don't have time to read the full thing. Glad to hear someone likes the more in depth stuff though!

[UI Design]

that's really a fantastic post ! added to my favourite blogs list.. I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.