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Scott Stroud's Essay

Our planet cannot endure the ways we now live, create, use, and discard. As user experience professionals, we have a profound and exciting responsibility – we must practice, teach, and innovate to improve our world's natural capacity to thrive. Here are three ways we can effectively influence the future of sustainability:

1) Model the variety of life in the world and catalog diverse needs

The User Experience Community has developed successful tools such as Personas to distill the character, needs, and goals of real people. These artifacts help everyone on a problem-solving team gain a human-centered perspective, but we often forget the basics. Humans want to remain productive over long periods of time. They want to endure. We also need to apply our tools to non-human beings. An animal or plant Persona approach could help us design and envision technologies that help our fellow living things continue.

2) Use limited resources to realize one product instead of many

Consider the Spork. It's a spoon! It's a fork! This prison cafeteria utensil follows the spirit of sustainability; however, if the goal is to eat soup without ruining your shirt, the spork doesn't deliver. The challenge for the User Experience Community is to create single products that satisfy multiple user goals and satisfy them well.

3) Practice "Sustainable Usability"

Our colleagues in the Architecture Community have Sustainable Architecture. Our version, Sustainable Usability, means we continually improve our work so that users continually expect and demand good products. The User Experience Community must seek to change our world into a place where effort is converted into promise.

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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