Over the past week, I’ve been taking online courses at Lynda.com to teach myself the basics of Ruby on Rails. I plan on creating a basic API that will store two or three variables for my Coal Button project. Before I dove into the world of server-side programming, I had lunch with Jonathan Berger, an engineering manager at Pivotal Labs, to chat about the project. He outlined what technically needed to be done for basic functionality, and offered his help as well as couch space in the office when I needed it. (Awesome)

So I’ve cracked open Terminal on my MacBook; installed Ruby on Rails and Gems; got the WEBrick server running; and setup a database and demo application. I’ve even started passing parameters with controller and viewer. Next step happens on Friday: learn about migrations and set up a model for the application.

This happens all the time in grad school: you study and work like mad to develop innovative ideas only to discover your amazing, new project is a recently launched product. It happens so often in fact that it has become a bit of a running joke among my classmates at SVA. A few weeks ago, my classmate Cooper discovered the LunaTick Touch Pen on Kickstarter which seemed to be the direct embodiment of months of thesis research from another classmate, Allison. Such much for pathos!

Well, today this feared occurence happened to me, but in the form of an article. In the recent issue of Wired, Clive Thompson outlines themes from the recently released book, The Conundrum by David Owen. Mr. Thompson describes the Jevons paradox: 

When steam engines became more efficient, the consumption of coal (for steam production) didn’t decrease – it expanded, because steam engines became cheaper to run and thus attractive for more and more things.

In a modern iteration, Jevons paradox is known as the rebound effect: as technology allows faster and easier access to a resource, that resource becomes cheaper and we use it up more quickly. Therein lies the issue; by creating efficiencies in fuel consumption, lightbulbs, and air conditioners only to use more, Mr.Owen argues we are creating our own environmental dichotomy. Mike Berners-Lee and I also apply this argument to our use of email, texts, and other forms of online communication. The act of uploading, distributing, and sharing content has become so easy that the high carbon act of writing a letter has been overwhelmed by countless, low carbon data transmissions.

While the concept is nothing new (Jevons introduced his concept in 1865), the rebound a effect was a nice little discovery I had in my pocket, waiting to be unleashed upon a crowd of a few dozen attendees at my thesis defense. But alas, no more. Clive Thompson and David Owen, with a readership in the millions, stole my thunder. In the end, this isn’t a Kickstarter project usurping my thesis project. I mean, my professor Rob Faludi described a version of the rebound effect to our Physical Computing class last year. Greenpeace even gives props to Jevons paradox in its’ recent report, “How dirty is your data?”

Hopefully, painful serendipity is only affirmation that me, Allison, and the rest of my classmates just might be onto something.

References:

Clive Thompson, “Unsaving the Planet,” Wired, March 2012.

Say you’re at a concert in the summertime. You and your friend set up your blanket, set up a nice little picnic spread, and settle in for a night of music. As the evening progresses, you can expect from time to time, you will stand up either an ovation at the end of a song or to get the attention of a wandering friend. After you stand, you sit back down. Then something curious happens: the band gets on stage and everyone in front of you begins to stand up. You’re soon blocked by the wave of standing people and left with the choice of seeing the stage or the backs of legs. So you stand in order to see the stage, forcing the people behind you to do the same.

This occurrence happens all the time at public events and can be described as the front row effect. Sometimes unwanted and at odds with your own intensions, it’s a behavior change initiated and sustained by strangers with similar interests. Keith Bradsher cited a similar example in High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV; as more SUVs came on the road, smaller vehicles were not enough to make us feel safe so we all went out and bought large SUVs in droves.

When convenience matters more than size, the front row effect can be applied to our efforts to live a more sustainable lifestyle. If everyone in front and around you is throwing away paper and plastic, it can be easy to feel dissuaded into not recycling even though the behavior is against your own values. The observed actions of others directly affect your own comfort, and we tend to conform to a group in a public setting. The front row effect becomes more of an “everyone-else-is-doing-it-so-i-might-as-well” mindset and have a powerful impact on an individual’s behavior in the context of a larger group of people.

References:

Bradsher, Keith. High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.

It’s been an awesome past few weeks and in the words of our program chair Liz Danzico, “It’s time to start making”. It’s been 95% research and interviews up to this point, and apart from writing and designing a few concept models, I am officially in making mode.

To kickoff the shift, I met with classmates Tina Ye and Chris Cannon (formally of Team Awesome in our Service Design class). Because thesis is a solo effort yet interaction designers are group oriented thinkers, we decided a weekly meeting was a great idea to bounce concepts around. I outlined my plan to make several projects, going for breadth not depth, in the hopes of facilitating dialogue around my thesis topic. In hoping to continue the discussion after graduation, I want to make a series of participatory experiments (prototypes for design research), on and off screen discursive design objects, and a system for offsetting the carbon output of digital communication.

It is a lot to make, but after talking with some experts in adjacent fields, I’m inspired and ready to move forward in my thesis development. In late January, I spoke with two Deena Rosen, Senior Manager of User Experience at OPower, and Stephan Von Muehlen, co-founder of Energy Hub. Both companies are redesigning our relationship with utility companies by giving customers real-time and historical data of their energy consumption. I first talked with Deena, who described how OPower’s product platform is rooted in cognitive psychology, in particular the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini. Researching the motivations behind energy consumption, Dr.Cialdini found that across all financial and environmental reasons that the only true motivator was what he called normative comparison.

Normative comparison is a concept where we compare our status and performance to people similar to ourselves, and we want to “normalize” our behavior with others. As individuals, we do not want to do any worse than a larger group in our energy consumption. In discussing this with Stephan, he mentioned that people also don’t want to do any better. He described a paradox of normative comparison, pointing out that we tend to take advantage of quantitatively “doing better” than others; if I’m conserving more energy than the majority of people I’m compared with, I will use that lead as an allowance and end up moving closer to the average (using more energy). However, if I’m given a qualitative measure - “Great Job, Dave!” - then I will most likely maintain that lead. Conversely, if I’m falling behind the group, qualitative encouragement will not work. Given quantitative data, I would treat my consumption like a game and try to conserve energy more.

In my conversations with Deena and Stephan, we covered many topics around methods for encouraging behavior change. Don Carli, director of the Institute for Sustainable Communication, has a different approach in working towards a sustainable future. Don is a fascinating character. He worked as a production artist for Robert Motherwell and others during the 1970’s in the New York art scene, and he helped develop standards for inkjet printer technology in the 1980’s. Now, he is advocating for industry standards on sustainable communication. Pursuing large companies with massive advertising budgets such as Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, he hopes to establish a series of measures that: identify the materials used to advertise/market a product, define them in a lifecycle, quantify those materials so as to track them, and then have companies make informed decisions around those agreed upon measures. In doing so, he hopes to prevent “greenwashing” in corporate communication and disclose resources used in advertising and promoting products/services.

Moving forward, I plan to incorporate two core concepts uncovered from my interviews: normative comparison and established measures. I started to learn Ruby on Rails to build a functional concept for one of my projects, and am testing out ifttt.com as means to track production of online content.

In Liz Danzico’s Thesis Presentation class, we had to present an overview of our purpose statement with (gasp!) no slides. The following is a transcript of what I presented to the class and visiting critics:

I’m investigating the environmental effects of our overfed data diets, in particular the disconnect that we as producers and consumers of digital content have with the physical infrastructure of the computing cloud. To frame my hypothesis, I asked the question. “Does demonstrating the correlation of cloud-based computing with carbon dioxide emissions lead to a decrease in digital consumption?”

What I’m talking about is the environmental impact of your data, specifically, the carbon footprint of bytes (KB, MB, GB) which requires infrastructure and energy to transmit and store. These bytes exist in large data centers, some powered in part by renewable resources with energy efficient architecture, while many others receive all their energy from non-renewable resources. Globally, data centers accounted for 1.5% of total electricity use and 2.2% of energy use in the US in 2010. These figures increased 36% (globally) and 56% (US) from 2005; research estimated in 2011 that global electricity use of data centers increased by 19%. 

I’m not the first to look into the environmental effects of cloud-based computing (thankfully). The work of Mike Berners-Lee, author of the Carbon Footprint of Everything, has – without being too esoteric – actually calculated the carbon dioxide emissions (CO2e) of a text message, google search, email, and the worlds data centers, which weigh in at a staggering 130 million tons of CO2e. Google has also calculated the carbon footprint of a search request at 0.2g CO2e. The amount is seemingly small, but with an estimated 200 million to 500 million search queries per day, 1.3 million tons of CO2e are produced per year just from Google searches.

Notwithstanding my explanations of environmental consequences, many people I’ve explained my thesis to claim the issue minute – “a drop of water in a sea of larger issues”. Individually, yes. But on a collective level, we encounter a phenomenon called the rebound effect: as technology allows faster and easier access to a resource, the faster that resource is used. The consequence is a low-carbon interaction resulting in a high-carbon lifestyle simply because we do it more.

More notably is the cloud computing phenomenon. As users, we are comfortable with not knowing the systems that house our data, specifically how much data we actually have amassed, where it is actually physically located, and that the government can access our data regardless of 4th amendment protections. As we produce and consume mass amounts of digital content, it seems that the cloud has become a digital attic for our quickly forgotten information and past interactions.

As the semester progresses, I will be proposing a set of tools and design interventions for the moment of production and consumption of digital content. Goals for my thesis include: conscious production and consumption of digital content, a higher awareness of the environmental effects and societal issues around cloud-based computing, an understanding of the systems behind cloud-based computing and digital content production/creation, and initiate a dialogue around theses topics.

References:

Berners-Lee, Mike. How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. Vancouver: Greystone, 2011.

Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D., “Growth in Data Center Electricity Use 2005 to 2010,” Analytics Press, August 1, 2011.

Urs Hölzle, “Powering a Google Search,” Google Blog, January 11, 2009. accessed December 3, 2011. link

Today, I had my first meeting with my thesis advisor Roger Mader, Senior Advisor at Velo and instructor of our Leadership & Ethics class. I chose Roger because of his values, inspiring dialogue, honesty, and no BS lectures. I also know he will keep me on track and drive me to do my best work over the next 3.5 months.

We met at Le Pain Quotidian in Tribeca to kickoff the semester and drink a lot of coffee. As I explained my thesis, he had some great suggestions for framing my arguments, namely using historical analogues. One suggestion was looking at the adoption of standards such as DC system advocated by Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla’s AC system. Another suggestion was to use examples of other disruptive communication technologies for similarites in bevahior change, giving us a “new normal”. The telegraph quickly popped into my head as an example: a technology that kickstarted the instant communication revolution.

We also discussed the idea of focusing on both production and consumption – limiting the damage of producers and changing the behavior of consumers. With more than enough caffine in my bloodstream, we set up a weekly meeting schedule and parted ways, me leaving exicted and energized to continue moving my thesis forward.

Over the past months, I’ve been reading several books on consumption, culture, design, and the environment. Before I close out the bulk of my secondary research, I want to highlight a few emerging themes regarding our digital production and consumption habits. (I still have to read The Information by James Gleick and Glut by Alex Wright)

I. Either Never Satisfied or Always Curious

“Our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end”, as Neil Postman paraphrases Henry David Thoreau in Technopoly. A lofty statement, but one that addresses a fundamental question underlying the torrent of technological advancement in the last 20 years - where is all this headed? While some believe the innovations in technology are leading to a singularity as futurist Raymond Kurzweil proposes, other thought leaders question the insatiable demand for new information and our dissatisfaction with the here and now.

John Thackara, author of In The Bubble, illustrates our growing dissatisfaction with the analogy of a boy, sitting under a tree, looking out over a landscape. In one case, the boy exists before the invention of the internet, cellphones, pagers; the other case describes the boy existing now. Which boy is more thoughtful in the moment, satisfied with the solitude of thought? Those not part of the Millennial generation might agree with the latter. Some, such as writer Clive Thompson, argues otherwise, saying the boy is actively seeking inspiration to share rather than waiting for some serendipitous apple to drop.

With his analogy, Thackara references the Italian concept of dolce far niente, describing one’s ability to find pleasure in idleness, literally meaning “sweet doing nothing”. Elizabeth Gilbert also writes about the concept in her book, Eat, Pray, Love. Both authors question whether we can enjoy a moment to ourselves without being able to communicate that feeling to others. In On Paradise Drive, David Brooks criticizes Americans who have never been satisfied with what they have and who are constantly pursuing the next best thing. Applied to our various communication devices, are we loosing our ability to be satisfied with our current place in life by chasing digital bits of potential affirmation?

II. Seamlessness and Time

A longtime priority of interaction designers has been to erase the boundaries between experiences with technology, i.e. create a seamless experience. This can range from how easily a user can charge or sync an iPod with his/her computer to the consistency of content design across devices (phone, tablet, computer, television). A fundamental promise of technology: save the user from the drudgery of tasks and make the ones required of them easier.

In Everywhere, Adam Greenfield points out that, as does computer scientist Mark Weiser, seamlessness can make experiences, “hard to tell when one thing ends and something else begins”. Think of it this way: where and when can you check your email? text or call a friend? Practically anywhere. With this ubiquitous power, our divisions of time – work time, family time, play time – are removed. Thackera also warns that even the design of our spaces can make our bodies, “physically desensitized from its sense of time”. Moreover, Postman laments that the promise of technology is to give us more time by accomplishing tasks faster, “Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph.”

Our attempts to create efficiencies with technology and task completion begets more space for other activities; this space however is often filled with more of the same activity – a consequence described as the rebound effect. The concept explains as technology allows easier access and faster use of a resource (time), the more of that resource is used. The effect leaves us wondering where all our time went.

III. Information as Metaphor: Water, Garbage, Food

Open access to a seemingly infinite amount of information is often framed as metaphor. In The Middle Mind, Curtis White describes the abundance of information as a deluge, leaving us to drown in sea of entertainment and communication when all we wanted was a drink. Postman moves up the pessimism scale, declaring, “Information has become a form of garbage”. Beyond subjectivity, his point is reinforced with the advent of content farms – creating content on a mass scale as quickly as possible to seed hundreds of websites for daily use, only to then be forgotten and “thrown away” into a far off database.

The most consistent metaphor used is information as food. Douglas Rushkoff quotes Shakespeare in his Frontline report, Digital Nation, saying “we are consumed by that we are nourished”. The more quickly we snack on tiny morsels of information [sic], the more our ideas are shaped into bursts of disconnected thought. In his report, Rushkoff points out as undergraduate college students produce and consume information through endless multi-tasking, their ability to defend a thoughtful, consistent argument in an essay is diminished. Gone are the days musing by Walden Pond.

Exploring similar themes in his new book, The Information Diet, Clay Johnson states, “information consumption is as active an experience as eating”, equating our cravings for salt, fat, and sugar in cheap foods with our desire for affirmation. By quickly viewing and sharing information, we fall prey to our desires of affirmation and recognition (as many media companies have learned), resulting in “information obesity”. Similarly, this rapid, cyclical behavior leads Microsoft researcher danah boyd to describe social media as being the “psychological equivalent of obesity”.

IV. The Cloud as a Virtual Attic and Digital Hoarding

While Postman describes information as garbage, more and more it seems to be something we can stash away in our cloud. Given the amount of storage available for various cloud-based services (generally advertised as being “unlimited”), producing and saving information is effortless. We are no longer limited by available storage on our computers and devices; we can save our digital content on nearly infinite levels. For example, as of today, I’m only using 88 MB of 7,671 MB available to me on my GMail account. Why delete an email when I can just have it on hand?

To me, this is a form of hoarding – saving items of little or no utility for the chance of *possible* use in the future. Seemingly irrational, our digital lifestyle has become a paradox of loss aversion, a decision theory determined by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Loss aversion states that we can make decisions based on our desire to avoid loss rather than acquire gains; fears of loosing our digital information forever can be alleviated by storing that information in the cloud. In his classic routine, George Carlin jokes that our homes are just places to store all our stuff. I would argue that our cloud-based services are not only means to access our content anywhere, but are actually digital attics where we can just store all our stuff.

V. Conspicuous Consumption vs. Conspicuous Production

Way back in 2001, David Brooks wrote Bobos in Paradise, which described a new upper class of now grey-haired bohemians who express their values with a bourgeois budget. It’s not enough to eat “morally neutral sausages”; Bobos must eat sausage made from local, free-range pork using a recipe passed down through the generations, costing far more than any offering from Jimmy Dean. ”Shopping, like everything else, has become a means of self-exploration and self-expression”, he writes. Through conspicuous consumption, we display our values and beliefs.

It is now 2012. Our consumption as communicating success has shifted to boasting through production of content. We are all our own PR firm and with the tools of social media, we can broadcast our lives and interests with a simple click or tap. This sentiment is echoed by Kickstarter co-founder Yancy Strickler and entrepreneur Zach Klein in a recent post, pointing out that conspicuous production is now our means for transmitting values. With every upload and post, we are not only showing the world what we have or what we find interesting, but we are also searching for affirmation. I doubt anyone would continue to post content without feedback from friends, family, or strangers.

In another book by David Brooks, The Social Animal, he mentions the ancient Greek concept of thumos: the human desire for recognition of one’s own existence. With today’s social media tools, our ability to fulfill our own personal thumos is for the taking (or clicking); but the question remains – if everyone is seeking recognition, can we all respond to one another despite the cacophony of requests?

VI. Starting to Lean Back

Apple founder Steve Jobs, in addressing a conference, said, “We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” What Jobs is referring to is the notion of “hot” and “cool” media, a concept first introduced by the late theorist Marshall McLuhan (also recently covered by Paul Ford in our Content Strategy class). “Hot” media are highly defined mediums which engage one sense of the viewer and require very little participation. On the other hand, “cool” media are low definition mediums that demand more viewer participation and require more attention.

Another closely related classification of media are “lean-forward” and “lean-back” mediums. Television is a “lean-back” medium where viewers want to be entertained and are in a relaxed, passive state. In “lean-forward” mediums, the Internet, for example, viewers are more engaged users of the medium and are in a more active state. But as Eli Pariser points out in The Filter Bubble, the Internet is becoming a “lean-back” medium.

Increasingly, we are watching more video content online. In fact, nearly a third of all Internet traffic is from watching movies and shows on Netflix. Both YouTube and Vimeo have recognized this trend and designed LeanBack and Couch Mode features respectively, so users can watch content on a television or by simply “leaning-back” in a chair. Notwithstanding online video content, our Internet tools and apps allow us to sort through and parse vast amounts of information, easing the burden of search. This does not sound bad at all, but Eli Pariser warns, “as personalized filtering gets better and better, the amount of energy we’ll have to devote to choosing what we’d like to see will continue to decrease.”

References:

Brooks, David. Bobos In Paradise. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Brooks, David. On Paradise Drive. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Brooks, David. The Social Animal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Clive Thompson, “The Instagram Effect,” Wired, January 2012. link

Douglas Rushkoff. “Digital Nation,” Frontline. Produced by Rachel Dretzin. Boston, MA: WGBH Studios, 2010. link

Greenfield, Adam. Everywhere. Berkley: New Riders, 2006.

Johnson, Clay. The Information Diet. Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2012.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

Nancy Miller, “Manifesto for a New Age,” Wired, March 2007. link

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.

Peter Svensson, “Netflix’s Internet traffic overtakes Web surfing” MSNBC. May 17, 2011. accessed January 18, 2011. link

Postman, Neil. Technolopy. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Thackera, John. In the Bubble. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

White, Curtis. The Middle Mind. New York: HarperOne, 2003.

The BBC recently reported that IBM researchers have created a 12-atom memory bit, and have even created a byte with eight, 12-atom bits. This entails, at least in a highly regulated lab environment, that a 100 KB file would only take up 1,200 atoms of space. This insanely tiny magnetic bit is basically a switch, storing either a 0 or 1, making a block for digital information. As the article reports, “it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk” which is still extremely small when thinking of earlier manifestations of a bit - the vacuum tube. With the physical size of our digital information shrinking ever smaller, I wonder how much relevant information we can cram into our digital attics.