John Thackara

Small design actions can have unintended consequences on the systems of the world, so we need new tools to visualize these systems and new skills to facilitate collective action upon them.

Imagine every product as having a “weight” of environmental impact, arising from its production, transport, use, and disposal. The principle of “lightness” says a sustainable approach needs to addresses all these relationships, not just the “end-of-pipe” product.

Technological development is not autonomous, nor inevitable. A focus on human judgement and collective action should inform our design actions as a society, so that we are actively deciding how technology should change the world, rather that just assuming that it does.

Healthier experiences with technology put the pace of fast or slow under our control, rather than assuming that faster is better.

Technology design should focus less on how to move things more efficiently and more on how to make the right local connections that would have gone unrecognized otherwise.

For more resilient and innovative experiences, design should strive for diverse interactions, work in between diverse communities, and recombine diverse models.

Meaningful, sustainable interaction design should be rooted in aspects of everyday life, pursuing a kind of participatory social fiction, rather than a spectacular science fiction.