Introducing the Highlight Topic "Designing for a Sustainable Future"

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – July 7, 2011

In the following, I would like to provide an overview of the articles that have been collected in the highlight topic, "Designing for a Sustainable Future", together with brief descriptions of the articles. I will conclude with a brief outlook on the future of this highlight topic.

 

Overview

At the onset, the highlight topic, "Designing for a Sustainable Future", is structured as follows.

Overview Article

Here, I offer an overview of the highlight topic and a brief outlook on its future.

Designing for Sustainability and SAP

Our introductory article, Sustainability, SAP, and Design..., discusses sustainability in the context of design and also reports on the activities of SAP as a company and of SAP User Experience in this area.

DUXU 2011 Sustainability Session

This article provides an overview of the paper session entitled, "Sustainability: Future Roles, Responsibilities, and Opportunities for the HCI Profession", that SAP User Experience team members Christine Ronnewinkel and Janaki Kumar have organized and will co-chair at the DUXU 2011 conference.

Sustainability and the Workforce

In a series of six articles, I investigate how designers – particularly user interface (UI), user experience (UX), and interaction (IxD) designers – can contribute to making a company's workforce behave more sustainably. In the first article, I looked for fields of action for designers and identified three: (1) commute and travel, (2) resource, energy, and waste management, and (3) organizational issues. In the second article, I stepped back to identify the sustainability aspects, as defined by Nathan Shedroff (2009), in which designers can have an impact. Combining action fields with sustainability aspects, I collected four possible action items for designers:

  1. Designing for remote collaboration and communication
  2. Using ambient displays to support awareness of remote colleagues
  3. Using persuasive design/technology
  4. Replacing physical objects with virtual (digital) ones

In four articles, I look at the action items one by one in more detail.

References and More

Last but not least, we offer a glossary of terms from the sustainability field, with a focus on design. In addition, we provide a list of links and references that are relevant to sustainability, again primarily with a focus on design and on the articles in this collection. Thus, it is by no means intended as an exhaustive link list for the topic of sustainability. Furthermore, we added two reviews of books that have been published on the SAP Design Guild and are relevant in the sustainability context.

 

Outlook

Like the 10th Anniversary Edition, which is now complete, this highlight topic is an ongoing project that we would like to keep alive for a while. This means that new articles will be published in the course of the next twelve months or so. And, as and when we publish further articles related to the topic of sustainability, we will include these articles here as well.

 

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