- the fading notion that every bit consumes power and needs a physical place to call home
- that it is actually possible to design products that persuade you to use them for a longer time instead of throwing them away at the first sight of a better one.
The latter issue is discussed in a paper by Verbeek and Kockelkoren (1998), they argue that products that are designed nowadays are made to look at its best when they are fresh of the shelf. Off course this fits within the view of the consumption economy we live in. If something is (seemingly) broken, scratched or can just be replaced by a newer version we will replace it. However, when products were to be designed by using materials that will increase in aesthetic value with longer use, then it might be able to create a sense of older = better. Designing only the exterior of a product to enhance durability will not work, company policies also need to modified to fit this new sense of durable consumption. Change in earn-models combined with durable design could maybe be capable of breaking our habits of consuming at any cost, reduce our lust for new and stimulate appreciation of the used.
A second and probably much more trending topic in the near future is the notion that every 'bit' of information has to have a physical location for storage (Blanchette, 2011). Along with this physical space for storage goes the power its consuming herewith. At first hand it might seem a trivial fact that every bit needs a physical location of storage, however streaming services like Spotify and Netflix have heavily decreased the awareness in consumers that by streaming they are actually retrieving bits from an often unknown location. The costs for storage and transportation of this information are not at all known to the consumer. In 'the old days', when all your data was on your computer, you could actually hear the work the computer had to do to retrieve all your data. New technologies have caused this awareness to the background.
A new era in computing called 'cloud computing' is about to take earlier mentioned streaming services to the extreme by placing almost all of the data and processing power in the cloud - a distributed network of computers - and therefore separating the consumer from any notion of power and storage consumption.
The latter not only puts constraints on designers but also on the way we use our computer and especially what damage we do by using it. Damage you ask? Because we have no feedback about the consequences of our internet surfing behaviour on energy consumption we have no idea what for instance a google-search costs us. Literature research shows that consequences of the trend of streaming and cloud computing have not been explored in much depth. A short article by Berl, Gelenbe, Di Girolamo, Giuliani, De Meer, Quan Dang & Pentikousis [2009] does investigate the possibilities of energy saving in the ICT business and conlude that cloud computing might save energy in the long run because there are more possibilities for monitoring, controlling and regulating internet usage. An important fact they leave out however is the behavioural changes that will occur as a result of new streaming and cloud services that are rapidly gaining ground.
I think the above is a very interesting discussion and will be a major point of focus in the environmental discussion in the near future. Streaming services and cloud computing hold great benefits in this increasingly mobile society, the question however is...at what (environmental) cost?
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten