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wud 2008

Human Factors International sponsors contest for World Usability Day 2009

HFI wants to give you a Kindle™!

Announcing... the contest winners!


Premjit Khanganba Sanjram's Essay

In a broad sense, sustainability implies the long term long-term maintenance of human wellbeing in a harmonic way of meeting human needs while preserving and performing responsible use of natural resources. This issue lies in the interface between material consumption and human fulfillment of modern life-style mediated by technology.

Technological innovation with careful design practices can generally reorganize human activities by playing an important role in helping to reduce individual and collective consumption of materials. This emphasis is especially pragmatic in the context of adopting an agreed upon definition which provides a standard answer to what sustainability is all about so that practitioners can execute its integration in the process of the product life cycle.

In this effort, the professional community could look at the need to have a 'Sustainability Standards Stamp' based on the assessment of the fulfillment of the criteria of sustainability standards. This inevitably requires reshaping individual consumer practices and systemic societal transformation. For instance, the print media as such consumes lots of paper to produce hard copies of the materials to reach the readers. Should we think of a sustainable solution to this, we must be able to consider design practices which would be 'contextually customized' based on requirement of the "situation" and the "individual users."

If it is for an individual to read a newspaper edition online, the service must be able to deliver the components of hard copy edition in terms of how it is perceived, learned, and used. Thus, designing products with the characteristics of natural experience of the interaction with device/system by the user will impact in terms of achieving the goal of sustainability.

It is crucial to balance technical functionality and human cognitive processes to create a system that is not only operational but also usable and adaptable to user needs.


Read Tim's essay  |  Read Dave's essay
Read Amy's essay  |  Read Arpana's essay  |  Read Brian's essay  |  Read Guiomar's essay
Read Leina's essay  |  Read Marisa's essay  |  Read Premjit's essay  |  Read Rhys's essay
Read Scott's essay  |  Read Tara's essay  |  Read Jimmy's essay

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About HFI

CEO Eric Schaffer keynotes at EISE 09 in London Oct. 30.
"Sorry Engineers, but Sustainability Means Lifestyle Change
(And only the psychologists can save us)
"


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