Building A More Holistic View of Sustainable

Project Planning At Green America

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Building A More Holistic View of Sustainable

Project Planning At Green America

What is within the
scope of UX?

What is within the
scope of design?

…and what is the designer’s role in fighting
climate change?

What is sustainability?

Case Study 1

the iPad

1:08

While doing the research for this talk, I video chatted with a friend in London because she is doing research on systemic oppression that I needed help with. My ability to have that conversation in real time—with video, which is important because you’ll notice how much of me talking involves waving my arms—was an unqualified good. And that is hugely important to keep in mind: Products such as the iPad have produced good in the world. Right? The things we create let people connect in amazing ways.

And so in tech when we talk about fighting climate change and sustainability we generally focus on the environmental aspects: power generation, use, and efficiency. If we expand that broader, we talk about the recyclability of our hardware, and a few particular chemicals used in production (eg. lead-free glass, highly-recyclable aluminium). And this is all good. We should be thinking about these things.

But the iPad and for that matter, the computer you are using right now. Do you know where it comes from? Can you account for the source of all the parts? If any of the gold or zinc comes from Bolivia, it probably used child labor. If any came from Congo, it proably used child labor and has helped fund wars.

If the neodymium in the magnets for your hard drives and electric cars were processed in Mongolia

What is within the
scope of UX?

Case Study 2

Tesla

That is pretty freaking awesome

…but…

Electric vehicles are the right answer to the wrong question.

Jeff Speck

The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging.…

David Owen

Our economy is measured by growth, but it’s a finite planet.

Sarra Tekola

What is within the
scope of UX?

The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.

William McDonough & Michael Braungart

Case Study 3

Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

A screenshot of Green America’s Fossil Free Divestment guide

This is the microsite my team built a few months ago.

To decide what to build I go through my normal process: gather requirements, help the authors understand what is possible for their content, help guide the overall storytelling process. Which is all well and good.

And like most modern developers I have frameworks and stuff I prefer, in this case I decided to use a Sass library I built and have used on other projects and Jekyll to generate a static site since the site didn’t need a database backing it.

Other background considerations: I primarily use virtual servers, but decided to stay away from Amazon because at the time we were actively running a campaign against AWS’s lack of a plan to migrate to 100% sustainable energy, which seriously affects what stacks we’re able to use. These are all considerations that the others speaking today have much more knowledge than I, so I’ll stop there.

The guide had fantastic content on telling people why they should move their money away from places that invest in fossil-fuels to socially responsible ones. And while other organizations have done great work helping guide major investors and entities (such as universities) away from fossil fuels, Green America is basically the only organization that concentrates on helping individuals move their finances to socially responsible institutions.

So disclaimer: I’m speaking here as myself and my views are not representative of Green America, but if you have investments or a retirement fund, I really do suggest looking at it. The feedbak we recieve most is from financial advisors saying that it’s helping them help their clients navigate the world of socially-responsible investing. In all, it’s touted as a success within our org and within the industry.

But here’s the problem: “within the industry”.

Divesting & Reinvesting

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

The language of sustainability—as commonly practiced—is in the language of affluence.

The problem of
banking desserts

Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.

Bill Bynum, CEO of Hope Credit Union

What is sustainability?

Sustainable is deeply context dependent.

Designer is just a fancy word for
“creators of solutions to problems”.

We must understand cultural contexts of our work and the systems we work in and perpetuate, intentionally or otherwise.

But we’ve been failing at it.

Though it’s not entirely our fault.

Systemic injustice is like technical debt.

The racist history of the environmentalism in the US, abridged

When you think about a cop shooting you, it’s an immediate death.…But climate change—with [related] pollution that’s mostly in our backyard—is still killing us. Respiratory diseases, asthma, and various cancers are slower killers, but connecting them to Black Lives Matter is really important.

Sarra Tekola

Sustainability must care for every community.

…not just the communities that can afford it.

How this affects sustainability work
in UX and tech

So those of us who work in the intersection of design and sustainability? We don’t hear those voices either.

This is not to say that the contemporary environmental movement is intentionally shutting marginalized communities out. By nature we humans are a pretty homophilous bunch. We tend to make friends and connections with people who are like ourselves. When we create new teams, we gather the smart people we know. And in many ways that can be a good thing because small groups of people are powerful catalysts for change. When we get together with like-minded people, we can easily have a shared vision, which honestly is one of the hardest parts of building teams.

But it is really hard for homogeneous teams to understand the complexities and needs of communities outside their experience. And that means that the needs of marginalized groups—who are often the most deeply hurt by climate change—are unheard and ignored in our work because we build for the problems we know.

Recyclable hardware, not ethical mining. Electric cars, not accessible transportation systems. Fossil free investing, not fossil-free banking. Health trackers that ignore menstrual periods. The list goes on.

We design for the problems we know.

Wherever there is an injustice and wherever people are exploited, the ecosystem as a whole will collapse.

Sarra Tekola

How this works in practice

Start with your
own behaviors

Banking & investments
Eat locally when you can
Look for socially responsible products
Practice self-care

Is the majority of your money in a giant international conglomeration or a local community institution? Find a credit union. We in tech are one of the richest sectors in the world, if even a fraction of us put our money into our local communities by using the neighborhood credit union, that expands the capital available for small business loans, fair mortgages and home loans within our own communities. If you need access to the services of a major bank for things like travel, keep an account open at ye olde megabank, but keep the majority of your savings in your local communities.

Look at where you work and where you live, look for communities that minimize how often you need a car. Support those communities. Look for mixed income housing, for that is among the best ways to build vibrant communities and raise low-income families.

Do the same with
your friends…

…and your offices.

Push for policies that support sustainability

This is not just laws, but also the policies of those who provide the products and services we use.

Take a hard look at your stack. That is not to say we should boycott businesses that do not have a sustainability plans in place. We’ve found that boycotts rarely work, what does work are loyal customers demanding change because we want to stay loyal.

Supply chains can be as transparent or opaque as the producers want. They can and will trace and audit the resources and materials involved in their production process down to the unit if they have reason to.

There is good news. (See, I’m not all gloom and doom.) In 2010, Dodd-Frank—which instituted Wall Street reforms and consumer protection laws—required that companies that use certain materials need to verify that their minerals do not come out of the conflict in Congo. But this shit gets smuggled out.

We as users, creators, and consumers need to also push the suppliers of the products we use and design to be better.

Hire for inclusion

If you’re starting a business, make social & environmental responsibility core

Take care of the most marginalized

This is hard work

…but this is the work we’ve been doing all along.

If sustainability work is to succeed, we need to look at the whole system. It’s not just shaping individual behavior, it’s shaping individual behavior, the behavior of our community, and the entire social system at once. And it has to all happen together because they’re so deeply interrelated. ☟

…but if you’ve been paying close attention, this is sort of what we’ve been doing all along. Figuring out that our fossil-free investing guide was not serving broad enough communities?

That’s about creating user personas and testing against them.

Designing new supply chains? That’s systems design. That’s process design. And real people are doing it. Right now Green America is bringing major electronics companies, regulators, and NGOs together to rethink their supply chain. This sort of change is not just a dream, it’s possible and it’s happening.

We are the designers of this world.

The first duty of those with privilege is to listen and to understand the issues of those without.

The second duty is to confront how the tools that power our own privileges shackle us to its structure to perpetuate itself.

Privilege is invisible to those who have it.

The global economy has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standard of people in distant nations who are involved in the production of products we use. Our daily lives put pressure on the global environment. It is irresponsible to bury our head in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.

Martha Nussbaum

32:00

As people working in design and tech, our work is impossible without worlds of knowledge and production to support us.

It is easy to feel like everyone is doing this for us. That we are the center of the world.

And it is easy to assume the world we live in is how the world works for everyone and how the world should be. After all, the only world we know is the one we live in.

But the view that our wants and needs are the same as everyone else’s, is an illusion. For the most part we enjoy privileges of infrastructure that makes our basic necessities background considerations. And if you are watching this, it is likely that you live in a world that is being designed and built specifically for your wants and whims. We are the ones who are designing the things that shape the world, and we’re doing it for ourselves because that’s what we know. But the rest of the world doesn’t have the same view.

Book: Not For Profit

Be diverse in who you are creating for and what you create.

Emily Gorcenski

Malice did not create this world.

Neglect and ignorance did.

As with most evil in this world, it was not malicious intent that created the mess of environmental injustice. ☟

It was neglect. Neglect of the environmental damage of our tools. Neglect of the miners and factory workers. Neglect of the black father who has to drive 30 miles to buy fresh groceries, and the Hmong mother who lives in a banking desert but can’t use our app because it has no Vietnamese translation. Neglect of the developers who missed their children’s first steps out in the living room because they were working 60 hours weeks and spending their nights in the home office shipping another line of code. Neglect of the independent consultant who can afford health insurance, but not the high deductible for their medication.

And confronting this system is hard. And discomforting. And scary.

It is cognitively easier to blame marginalized groups for their plight than it is to accept that society is
fundamentally unjust.

It is so much easier to go back and pretend that the world that we live in, the world that tells us we are amazing and everything we do is important, right, and everyone who dissents is wrong.

It is so much easier to says marganalized groups are falling over because they needed more grit. That they weren’t “entrepeneurial enough”. That they need to “lean in” more. That we who are on top are here because of nothing but the labor of our own hands.

But what opportunity to create Facebook did the child slave in Congo have? With what app was she supposed use to report the abuses of the local general? How much do the Solomon Islands have to lean in to keep their islands from sinking? How much grit did black neighborhoods in New Orleans need to convince the powers that be that their levees need to be stronger?

Sustainability work is social justice work.

…and social justice work hurts.

We can not let our work as technologists working in sustainability become yet another tool of oppression.

Taking care of people is not always profitable.

We need to challenge our definitions of success and progress, and to stop considering our work in solely commercial terms. We need to radically improve our systems of compensation, to be responsible about credit and attribution, and to be generous and fair with reward and remuneration. We need to consider the impact our work has on the planet. We need to consider the impact our work has on civic and academic institutions, on artistic expression, on culture.

Anil Dash

36:01

The book Cradle to Cradle wants us to think about the cherry tree. The traditional system of production exploits the land and returns nothing, its values are efficiency and reducing consumption while increasing production. But the cherry tree is horribly inefficient, every year it produces thousands of flowers to reproduce just a few saplings, the flowers and fruit return to the earth around it and nourish the animals and ground around it. And we call it beautiful.

Do not get me wrong, this is nothing short of reimagining our entire social and economic system. But that is what we must do because the world is deeply intertwined.

And so we must find ways to bring everyone along to create the change in the world we all seek. Only then, when everyone’s voice is heard and understood, will we be able to create a society that sustains and nourishes all.

Source: Toward Humane Tech

Thank you

presentations.bernardyu.com/2016.02/sustainableux/

@thebestsophist

Building A More Holistic View of Sustainable

Project Planning At Green America

Building A More Holistic View of Sustainable

Project Planning At Green America

What is within the scope of UX?

What is within the scope of design?

…and what is the designer’s role in fighting climate change?

What is sustainability?

Case Study 1

the iPad

What is within the scope of UX?

Case Study 2

Tesla

What is within the scope of UX?

Case Study 3

Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment

The problem of banking desserts

What is sustainability?

The racist history of the environmentalism in the US, abridged

How this affects sustainability work in UX and tech

How this works in practice

Start with your own behaviors

Do the same with your friends…

…and your offices.

Push for policies that support sustainability

Hire for inclusion

If you’re starting a business, make social & environmental responsibility core

Take care of the most marginalized

This is hard work

We are the designers of this world.

Privilege is invisible to those who have it.

Thank you

What is within the
scope of UX?

What is within the
scope of design?

…and what is the designer’s role in fighting
climate change?

What is within the
scope of UX?

What is within the
scope of UX?

The problem of
banking desserts

How this affects sustainability work
in UX and tech

Start with your
own behaviors

Do the same with
your friends…