So in this our final chapter in the series, we tackle the not-as-well-known social aspect of sustainability. When you think of being “green” you don’t immediately think being “fair”. But this is one of the most important parts. Think about it, what good is protecting the natural world if we’re destroying our neighbor’s and future neighbors’ ability to enjoy it?
I hope these 4 concepts, built around the Natural Step Framework, give you a jumping off point to do your own digging on the topics presented. But more importantly I hope there’s something in here that motivates you to do something, anything to contribute. Even if it’s just spreading the knowledge.
The size of the problem = the size of the opportunity
I’ve been deeply immersed in Usability these past weeks preparing for the upcoming CV3 User conference, where they’ve graciously asked us to do a session on Effective Page Design. While digging into this concept, I of course enlisted the help of my own in-house e-Commerce retailing guru (see: wife) and conducted what turned out to be a mini usability test of 2 of her most visited shopping sites. Endless.com and Zappos.com. Her answers to my questions were not only insightful, but also confirmed a lot of what I’ve been reading.
Moving on to the 3rd part in our series, (click here for bite one, and here for bite two to catch up) we tackle the issue of depleting natural resources. As the System condition states, we must,
Eliminate our contribution to the progressive physical degredation and destruction of natural resources.
Naturally, this chapter also introduces you to the idea of calculating your water footprint.
Neither of these have anything to do with design but it’s hard to not share when you find greatness like this.
Blow 1: 6th Sense Tech:
Our favorite futurist Frank shared this with us yesterday. Of course we’ve come to expect nothing less than cutting edge and inspirational from TED videos but this took the cake.
Blow 2: Music Production 2.0
There’s 6 more of these on his site but this was my favorite. It truly represents the shift into the DJ culture DJ Spooky talked about some time back. The idea of Open Source music creation taken to its logical and most creative conclusion. Enjoy!
