How much CO2 does this article produce?

(CNN) — Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.
How green is your website? Calculating all the factors involved in a website can be tricky.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Read the rest on CNN

July 2009

We’re not as green as we think

Canadians who look in the mirror and see green may be environmentally colour blind, according to a new study.

Researchers compared how Canadians perceive their commitment to the environment and what they actually do about it in a study commissioned by marketing firm Cossette Communication and Summerhill, an environmental consultancy.

On average, people believed they were 20 per cent greener than their reported behaviour showed, the study found.

For example, close to 80 per cent of respondents said they use reusable drinking containers regularly, Cossette’s Nick Cowling said. “Yet if you are standing in the lineup at Starbucks or Tim Hortons or Second Cup and you look around, of course 80 per cent of people in the lineup are not doing that. They’re going to use the paper cup they’re given.”

Read the rest on CBC

July 2009

Design with intent

A great read about the role of good design and interaction in behavioral changes.

Over the past several months, I’ve been fortunate to meet and talk to a number of people — among them Jan Chipchase of Nokia, Peter Whybrow of UCLA, and Caroline Hummels of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands — about the role of the designer in behavior change. Our conversations echoed the pent-up ambitions I’ve often heard from the young designers I teach and work with. They also reinforced my belief that we’re experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement. Institutions that drive the global social innovation agenda, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have shown an interest in this new approach, but many designers hesitate to pursue it. Committing to direct behavior design would mean stepping outside the traditional frame of user-centered design (UCD), which provides the basis of most professional design today.

Read the rest at design mind

June 2009

“How David beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell

A great article by Malcolm Gladwell on what it means to be a competitive underdog. Gladwell talks about why “common” sense is not always the most successful strategy on the courts, battlefields or in business.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

Full article in The New Yorker

May 2009

The recession changing shopping habits

I needed to buy a network drive enclosure for all of my work files, and since the economy is not in the greatest shape, I had to do a little more research into what I wanted and where I could get it for the best possible price. First, using Google, I came across a fairly reputable review site SmallNetBuilder with a strong community of experts. D-Link DNS-321 and DNS-323 were recommended to me so I was set to seek out a deal on these enclosures. I have had very good experience with D-Link personally, so I was pretty set on this model – all the features made sense and the price range seemed affordable.

As I usually do, I first visited TigerDirect and looked at what they had in stock. I found my DNS-323, which was listed at $225.99 + tax and shipping. Ouch. Having heard of Dell on Twitter, I decided to see if I could find a better deal there. After talking to a few Dell Twitter employees using TweetDeck, they located a deal on DNS-323 for $145.99 and $0 shipping. I completed the sale and received the product the next day. What a great brand experience – it took me about 30 minutes to make an educated purchase at a great value, based on a multitude of custom recommendations and personal connections.

A company that has a meaningful dialogue with its customers and provides them with great value will sell.
Bravo, Dell.

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with Dell and have never been their customer.
P.S.S. Today I came across this article, which perfectly reinforced up my experience:

Asked whether they want more stuff, consumers in rich countries have responded with an emphatic “No”. The breathtaking speed with which retail sales have plummeted in both America and Europe (see chart) has caught retailers and manufacturers by surprise. In response, companies have tried desperately to prop up revenues using a variety of promotions, advertising and other marketing ploys, often to no avail.

But as they battle with these immediate problems, marketers are also pondering what longer-term changes in consumer behaviour have been triggered by the recession. It is tempting to conclude that, once economies rebound, customers will start spending again as they did before. Yet there are good reasons to think that what promises to be the worst downturn since the Depression will spark profound shifts in shoppers’ psychology.

…

The downturn will also accelerate the use of social media, such as blogs and social-networking sites, by consumers looking for intelligence on firms and their products. As trust in brands is eroded, people will place more value on recommendations from friends. Social media make it harder for brands to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes, but they also offer canny companies a powerful new channel through which to promote their wares and test new products and pricing strategies.

Marketers ignore the messages that emanate from these groups at their peril. For one thing is clear: this recession has triggered a wholesale reappraisal by shoppers of the value that their habitual brands deliver. The winners will be those that adapt intelligently to the new reality. The losers will be those who think they can win simply by telling consumers to “Want It!”

Read the rest on Economist

April 2009