The growth of the world population and the impact of the human activity on the Earth make the scientific community aware of the central role of the topic of the sustainability. During the last years, this topic has become more and more relevant within the scientific community, by moving from a transversal topic to a central one.
Within the interaction design community, sustainability as new topic of interest seems to provocate the first changing on the disciplinary discourse.
The discipline of the interaction design, on various levels, has been characterized by the notion of user-centered design, which is a notion basically focused on the satisfaction of users needs and an untouchable paradigm that has reflected a functionalist point of view rather than a design point of view.
In the perspective termed as Sustainable Interaction Design, Eli Blevis defines design as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being, a way that focuses on users behaviour rather than on users satisfaction: a way that indicates a cognitive model focused on the design of human conditions rather than a cognitive model based on the user-centered design.
 
The growth of the environmental awareness seems to be important for a changing within the interaction design discipline as well as within the HCI, because the notion of user-centered design is going to be perceived as environmentally harmful. This fact has two main consequences.
 
The first consequence is to re-create a balance between the engineeristic approach based on “needs and requirements” – which things can be done – and the design approach based on “values and propositions” – how things could or should be done – in the other terms a balance between the technological development and the cultural interpretation of technology. In fact, the notion of user-centered design has been often used for giving and developing products provided with new features and functions, a notion that gives answers to user needs but doesn’t give answers to the human being needs. The limit of the notion of the user-centered design has had its roots in the lack of a cultural perspective of technology and the role of the designer, which should play as the intellectual figure that drives consumer attitudes and production strategies.
 
The second consequence regards the same definition of the interaction design discipline. Considering interaction design as the discipline of defining the behaviour of products and systems that an user can interact with, we can observe that this definition is focused on the products and the systems features, the end-user side of the design activity. In the general context of design, and specifically in the context of sustainability, interaction design could and should be considered as the discipline that sets the user’s behaviours, an activity targeted to the human being that figures out future ways of being.
Following this direction, the role of the interaction design should be focused on driving human behaviours through the improvement of the “habitability” of the world, defining which products we should need, how they should be done, how they should work and how they should be used. The interaction designer, as intellectual figure, should generate sustainable behaviours and drive conscious user’s experiences by defining products and services.

In this sense, the interaction designer could play on different levels. The first one is an intellectual level, where the designer could play his cultural, political and ethical role investigating and interpreting the human condition in order to propose products and services that stimulates different ways of being. The second one is a practical level, where the designer could play a pragmatic role working on the development of products and services based on environment friendly technologies, features and functions.
The third one could be an opportunistic level, where the designer could play a “smart” role, taking advantages of user’s behaviours. An example is the work of studio Roosegaarde focused on the collision of technology and the human body to generate electricity through the movements of the dancing people.

This work, combined with the others published in this first issue of MAInD, shows different roles and levels of the interaction design activity in the context of sustainability: the key point between interaction design and sustainability is the behaviour of human being, a constitutive element for the interaction design discipline.

by Massimo Botta