As I was listening to Al Gore on Fresh Air yesterday (5/30) talk about his new book and movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, it occurred to me that solving global warming, if that’s possible still, is an information design problem.

Maybe this is pretty self evident to others, so bear with me while I noodle on what appear to me to be the three major roadblocks, and how information design can help.

We don’t understand systems well

Global warming is a systemic problem, no surprise there. Unfortunately our tools for understanding systems, as opposed to components of systems, are still pretty poor. Despite the best efforts of people such as Douglas Englebart, the overall capacity of humanity to comprehend and tackle complex systems has remained rather low. There are esoteric examples to the contrary, such as game theory and other economic models, but for the lay person we are still woefully under-equipped. Examples? News media give little context for events, instead treating a local shooting or Darfur as isolated “who could have known” events. Our educational systems don’t help that much, they tend to focus on discrete events but don’t tie them together very well (wars and inventions are largely taught in a vacuum). Things get even worse the further along educationally you go, as specialization increases and separation between disciplines grows ever larger, particularly in the sciences.

Everything that we do contributes to global warming. Sitting at home watching TV causes it. This leads to a state of paralysis. I pretty much throw up my arms in despair. It seems beyond my control.

Who’s looking at the big picture? Who is able to connect what’s going on with their species of algae with what’s going on in the ionosphere and connect that back to oil derivatives?

Not everything in the system matters (as much)

Has anyone done a sensitivity analysis on the causes of global warming? In other words, what things should we focus on for the biggest impact on preventing ourselves from passing the point of no return, if we haven’t already? Are the usual suspects (cars, power plants, etc.) really the biggest problems? What if unplugging all my electronic devices at night has a bigger impact than driving a Prius? (Especially since it takes more energy to make a Prius than it will consume in its lifetime.)

Everything that we do contributes to global warming. Sitting at home watching TV causes it (TV and lighting requires electricity, and burning coal is a primary means of generating electricity in the US). This leads to a state of paralysis. If my mere existence on the planet (at least in the developed nations) is causing harm, I pretty much throw up my arms in despair. It seems beyond my control.

However, tell me what the top 3 things are that will have a big impact, now that I can handle.

Another tendancy is to link global warming and environmentalism with a broader political agenda: human rights, worker rights, economic inequality, organic agriculture. There is overlap in some of these to be sure, but let’s not kid ourselves: these are problems that have been around for centuries and will probably still be around for centuries. We can’t wait that long to solve global warming. These are baggage that are slowing us down. Deal with them separately. Bill McKibben puts it succinctly:

There are, obviously, all kinds of ecological perils out there. We’ve overfished our seas, we’ve overcut our forests. Fresh water is beginning to run short, and species are disappearing at a rapid rate. You can come up with a long and troubling list, including the disturbing fact that most of the world’s people are so poor they can barely summon the energy to care about the larger world. But it’s becoming very clear that the overriding, overpowering summation of them all is climate change—lose this battle and it won’t matter if we win all the others, because it’s simply so much bigger, and connected to everything else.

Understanding systems requires feedback loops

A big part of successfully understanding systems is understanding the influences the components have on one-another, which means having understandable feedback loops. Simple systems can easily be understood with clear feedback loops: flick this switch and this light goes on. My dogs understand that the clanging of a metal bowl means food is coming soon (though the light switch is probably beyond them). But how long do you think it took humans to figure out that sex caused children? It’s self-evident now, but not perhaps not so obvious to old Homo Erectus, given that sex was probably fairly frequent and there’s a nine month time lag until the end-result.

In The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman talks about the old-style controls in refrigerators for adjusting relative coolness of fridge and freezer. In the old days these were inter-dependent so it was somewhat complicated to get them right. It was easy to tell the symptoms (my ice cream has melted or my milk has frozen), but not what to do about it. The fridge made understanding the feedback loop challenging, first by a lack of intuition in the controls, and second by having a 24 hour period go by before you could tell what effect your adjustments had had. Humans just don’t do very well with that kind of time frame. Light switch, yes. Fridge, no.

Now extrapolate that feedback loop out to periods of decades or centuries, which is what the time lag is for most climate change.

Information Design to the Rescue?

So to sum up: Improve our understanding of the system, find out what will have the biggest impact to change it, and then give people a tight feedback loop so they know their actions are having the desired effect.

This has information design written (or drawn) all over it.

There are some great examples of information design in regards to the environment, such as Seed Magazine’s annual report on the planet (graphic at left is from it). However, most just tell us the symptoms. That’s like the evening news telling me someone got shot in my neighborhood: it makes me worried, it makes me feel helpless, it makes it seem random. None of these are true, and we need to dig deeper. Providing a real understanding of the global climate and what causes what should be Job One for information designers today.

I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, or had the opportunity to hear Gore give his presentation, which is apparently very good, so maybe he goes beyond this level, but the website falls into the same trap. For example, there’s an eCard you can send that compares a glacier from 1978 and 2004. News I should be worried about? Yes. News I can use? Not so much. There are several pages of tips of things one can do to decrease your environmental footprint, however these lack the crucial feedback loop to tell you whether you are doing enough or give you the pat on the back from making a successful contribution. Without the feedback it’s like setting aside money for your 401k each paycheck (causing you near term pain) but never giving you a statement or prediction of your future income (to let you track progress toward a tangible future).

Information design is also largely about “compared to what?” as Edward Tufte would say. Help us understand which parts of the system really matter by showing us this compared to that. This helps our decision making and will get us to a solution quicker.

Lastly, use visual design (static, dynamic, whatever) to convert the feedback loop of cause/effect from abstract and distant to concrete and visceral. This lets us know we are doing the right thing and gives feedback as to progress.

Virtually every project I work on involves gaining an understanding of the OOBE - the out-of-box-experience. What is it like to take the product out of the box for the first time, look through the manual, and get everything set up and configured the first time. This has become an area of increased attention for many manufacturers over the last few years, partly because they realize it’s an important element of overall customer satisfaction, and because a well-done OOBE can reduce costly product returns due to users not being able to properly set up and use the product the first time.

Thanks to the web we have seen an increasing number of OOBE’s documented by the product purchasers. The spectacular original iPod packaging in particular prompted several people to post photos showing the multiple steps involved in unboxing the iPod.

 Now a site has come along dedicated entirely to this activity. It’s called, not surprisingly, unboxing.com. “Share in the unboxing ceremony!” is their motto, and points to how the OOBE has become more fetishistic and elaborate as more attention has become focused on it. For those of us that need to do quick comparative studies of OOBE’s, this is like manna from heaven!

A couple of weeks ago GM discontinued the Hummer H1 after sales dropped to 100 per year of the militaristic looking “SUV”. The fact that it is the vehicle of choice of our Kalifornia Governator, Ahnold Schwarzenegger, says it all really: it is (was) the epitome of macho poserism. Happy as I am to see it cancelled, I also think this is symptomatic of a worrying down-turn in the American psyche, and perhaps not for the reason you might think.

If you’re above the age of 35 you might remember the classic TV series Connections done by James Burke, in which he engagingly wove together stories of scientific discovery and technological development to show how unexpected events could be triggered by well-intentioned inventions. The first episode started out with the story of the 1978 power blackout that affected all of New York City, and commented on how riders on the subway bided their time assuming that the power would be restored and they would be rescued. It never occurred to them, states Burke, that it would not come back on. He then goes on to describe in vivid detail how dependent we are on our complex technological systems. If things really went sideways, would you know how to plow the land, for example?

The response of the subway riders is ingrained in the American psyche: the future will be better than the past (or at least not any worse). The idea that life would get worse, rather than continuing to improve and become richer, more comfortable, more upwardly mobile, is unthinkable. To think it is almost, in fact, un-American. This word has a unique moral power in this country: it’s not the same at all as saying un-English or un-French, which merely indicate a lack of decorum of taste. America is not just a country, it’s an idea. To say that the standard of life will retrograde goes against the moral fibre that built the country, that inspired its very creation.

The Hummer H1 was a tragic-comic expression of this ideal, flying in the face of all logic and scientific knowledge. Oil is running out, that’s a fact. We are polluting the atmosphere to the breaking point, that’s a fact. America’s 5% of the world population is using 25% of the world’s resources, that’s a fact. GM chose to make the H1 anyway, cynically understanding that people would buy it regardless, because they could not conceive of a future bleaker than today.

Consider: the H1 is cancelled, oil prices are high, America has made a hash of the Middle East, this season’s Survivor was the boring-est ever, this global warming thing might actually be taking effect. Is it all sinking in and the America people are staring into the abyss?

(By the way, if you want to have some self-indulgent fun at Hummer’s expense, check out fuh2.com)

 

This morning I had to sign for a package being delivered by UPS as our front-desk receptionist was out at lunch. This was something I've done many times but not recently, and the electronic "clipboard" that the delivery man handed me was different than the ones I've used before. It was much more rounded and "ergonomic" looking in the stereotypical sense, but the layout of the controls and the signing area was different than I was familiar with. To top it off, I couldn't for the life of me find the stylus. After a few seconds of me bobbing my head trying to find it, the UPS man angled the leading edge of the unit toward me. I still couldn't see anything. Then he said to pull out the black stub on my left side. Finally I realized that the black rounded piece of plastic that looked more like a lanyard hook was actually the end of the stylus. Pulling it out I was at last able to sign for the package.

OK, so maybe I was dulled by a low blood sugar given the time of day, but I couldn't help thinking that this was a rather poor design. Take a look at these pictures to see what you think.

The second picture shows the underside, you can see how they have exposed the stylus so the UPS person can push the stylus out for grabbing by the customer. Good idea, but why should this be necessary? Why isn't the stylus in an eye-grabbing color, like the top of the oil dipstick in this Audi engine bay? UPS already has yellow/gold in its color palette, that would be a good starting point as a touchpoint color.

I asked the UPS man if this was a common problem. "All the time," he replied. For a company that aims to optimize efficiency of every step of its delivery chain, this seemed a glaring oversight. Years ago when working in a photography store I noticed that the UPS man who brought our daily delivery of Nikon lenses and Kodak film always had the truck keys on the same finger of his hand. I asked him about it, and he said that was part of the training - one little detail that shaved precious seconds off a stop and got him back on his way that much quicker. In contrast, this unfindable-stylus problem is a whopper.

For regular signers of UPS packages this is something I expect they get used to. Even then, I think the positioning is awkward and causes a strange social interaction with you having to stare down your chest and necessitating a long loss of eye contact). It puts a lot of cognitive load on all users, but especially on infrequent or new users like me. Also, while 90% of the population is right-handed, the stylus is on the left side (perhaps the UPS person uses it as well, in which case it's in the correct spot for them - ah the vagaries of designing for multiple users.)

Balancing the needs of new versus experienced users is a common problem in product and interaction design. The iPod, for example, is clearly geared toward a shallow learning curve to get new users into the fold easily, but it's menus, while easy to learn, are cumbersome after a short while, requiring lots of clicks back and forth to do relatively common activities. (Example, from listening to a song it takes 5 clicks, a wheel spin, a click, a wheel spin and another click to turn shuffling of the playlist on or off. On a Sony Discman from 15 years ago it was a single button click at any time.)

There was a discussion recently over at another blog (sorry, don't recall which now, if someone knows I'll link to it)  that talked about faucets in hotel bathrooms, which have many of the same issues. A faucet or shower control that is OK at home because you only need to learn it once, may not work well in a semi-public setting such as a hotel, since a large proportion of your customers/users will be first time (and may not come back for a second if you sufficiently confound them). The learning curve in such a context should be non-existent and make use entirely of knowledge in the users' head, as Don Norman has put it.

I don't want to slam on the designers of this product too much as I'm sure there were constraints up the wazoo. Still, I think the clipboard metaphor perhaps adds confusion because it mimics a paper clipboard in the gross sense, but confuses in all other ways. While the stylus on the bottom is "logically" easier for the user to access, it confounds our archetypes about where pens live on clipboards - on the top surface at the trailing edge, instead of on the bottom surface of the leading edge. For frequent users like a receptionist, perhaps OK (even then, I don't think it's ideal). For infrequent users and first-timers like me, it's probably just cost UPS about $0.22. Multiply that by 14.8 million packages a day....

Spring here in the San Francisco Bay Area seems to have come and gone while I was in the shower last weekend, and we are now straight into summer. In honor of that fact, I'm belatedly changing the banner to a shot of some daffodils tulips [thanks Jonathan] that I took in Chicago last year.