\u3ci\u3eThe Center of the World\u3c/i\u3e

A body of water is often seen as a serene place of relaxation, but just under the surface, aquatic life bustle around. This creative narrative will spark your imagination into having you believe that you are placed in the shoes of a wandering student as you encounter this great entity, known as the Bryant Pond. This journey will allow you to free your mind, and let it wander as you get lost in your own imagination. Have you ever wondered how certain things came to be, such as out-of-place objects in an environment that could have naturalistically been put there, but has a very small probability of actually being real nature? The Bryant Pond is located at the center of the university campus, and is an eye-catcher as you meander around. The pond acts as a waypoint for students, allowing them to navigate the campus with ease. Surrounding the pond are various forms of the environment, ranging from trees, to grass, to weeds and reeds around the perimeter of the pond. Since the pond is a secluded area inside of the campus, how did aquatic marine life come to be in this sort of environment with no connecting bodies of water? This would allow nothing to get in or out, unless an outside factor was to come into play. Fish swim around in the pond, and that draws the question on how they got there since there are no bodies of water connecting. Birds could have been the primary individuals that caused the influx of these marine creatures through transporting eggs in their feathers, or us humans could have planted them there to reconstruct a replica pond. Knowing and “Understanding the way that fish are dispersed in remote bodies of water is important for the maintenance of biodiversity”[1], and it can expand the wildlife that lives on Bryant’s campus. Maybe the bigger question is, what relationship do we have with the environment, and what do we do to appreciate what it has provided for us? [1] “Dispersal of Fish Eggs by Water Birds – Just a Myth?” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, February 19, 2018. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180219103258.htm

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Rethinking green entrepreneurship - fluid narratives of the green economy

Green entrepreneurs have been seen as key drivers for a transition to a green economy. However, there has been limited in-depth qualitative empirical research with green entrepreneurs to date, focusing instead on typologies categorising certain ‘types’ of green entrepreneur. Moreover, the literature rarely situates such individual activities within broader concepts such as the green economy. In contrast, we suggest that current discourses of the green economy are important in contextualising the ways that green entrepreneurs make sense of themselves and their businesses. Green entrepreneurs are thus negotiating varying tensions between their business activities, environmental philosophies, and wider contexts at the intersection between the green economy and the mainstream economy. Drawing on evidence from 55 interviews, we explore the narratives employed by green entrepreneurs to situate themselves within/outwith the wider green economy – the recursive framing of mainstream and niche ‘green’ activities provides a sense of the tensions and politics at play in the development of the green economy. We thus offer a new and more dynamic view of the evolving nature of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a green entrepreneur, rather than relying on the fixed categories espoused in previous typologies. We conclude that it is important that policy makers recognise the complex and contentious nature of green entrepreneurship, and that it is essential to view the green economy as a diverse constellation of myriad actors rather than corporate reinventions of business as usual

Motivating sustainable goal choices and providing effective feedback

Overconsumption of natural resources and the associated environmental hazards are one of today’s most pressing global issues. In the western world, individual consumption in homes and workplaces is a key contributor to this problem. Reflecting the importance of individual action in this domain, this thesis focuses on studying and influencing choices related to sustainability and energy consumption made by people in their daily lives. There are three main components to this work. Firstly, this thesis asserts that people frequently make ineffective consumption reduction goal choices and attempts to understand the rationale for these poor choices by fitting them to goalsetting theory, an established theoretical model of behavior change. Secondly, it presents two approaches that attempt to influence goal choice towards more effective targets, one of which deals with mechanisms for goal priming and the other of which explores the idea that carefully designed toys can exert influence on children’s long term consumption behavior patterns. The final section of this thesis deals with the design of feedback to support the performance of environmentally sound activities. Key contributions surrounding goals include the finding that people choose easy sustainable goals despite immediate feedback as to their ineffectiveness and the discussion and study of goal priming mechanisms that can influence this choice process. Contributions within the design of value instilling toys include a theoretically grounded framework for the design of such toys and a completed and tested prototype toy. Finally, contributions in designing effective and engaging energy consumption feedback include the finding that negative feedback is best presented verbally compared with visually and this is exemplified and presented within a working feedback system. The discussions, concepts, prototypes and empirical findings presented in this work will be useful for both environmental psychologists and for HCI researchers studying eco-feedback

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life (20th Anniversary Edition)

The recent release of Pope Francis’s much-discussed encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has reinforced environmental issues as also moral and spiritual issues. This anthology, twenty years ahead of the encyclical but very much in line with its agenda, offers essays by fifteen philosophers, theologians, and environmentalists who argue for a response to ecology that recognizes the tools of science but includes a more spiritual approach—one with a more humanistic, holistic view based on inherent reverence toward the natural world. Writers whose orientations range from Buddhism to evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Native American beliefs explore ways to achieve this paradigm shift and suggest that “the environment is not only a spiritual issue, but the spiritual issue of our time.”https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_press/1003/thumbnail.jp

The objectness of everyday life: disburdenment or engagement?

The article grew out of a conference paper, ‘The objectness of everyday life: engagement and disburdenment’, Material Geographies, UCL, September 2002. An expanded version of the paper was included in a special themed section of an issue of Geoforum. The paper intervenes into contemporary philosophical scholarship on the nature of use-value, usability, design and ethics. The article has been directly engaged with in an academic journal; Christensen, Carleton B. (2005) ‘The Material Basis of Everyday Rationality: transformation by design or education?’, Design Philosophy Papers No.4,)