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Tara Schnaible's Essay

In a reversal of its traditional role, UX needs to bring all its tools to bear in order to change the behaviors of industrial production and user consumption. This issue is important because human life stands to suffer continuing its practices (whether through shifting industry to sustainable practice/resources or through encouraging different consumer behaviors).

Within UX our involvement in product creation is typically to better match the product to the human behavior, however I believe this position neglects the role UX must play in exacting a mental model shift with an issue like sustainability. In a world that lives so well beyond sustainable resource consumption the UX community holds important insights toward how to effectively communicate messages that can enact positive change. Our primary role is to address sustainability as a design challenge (observe the people-technology interactions – and then communicate those insights to product teams so that they might use those interactions in a way to better encourage product adoption). It is also our challenge to create messages with rich emotional stories that retain their meanings well after the message medium has passed.

This is a controversial stance to take for a profession that prides itself in its neutrality, but our approach should be all about the most effective methods. Messaging may be a more graceful approach to some situations than design. Effective framing of users' purchasing context to industry can inform that most people care about this issue, but that it takes a second seat to economic concerns. Similarly, packaging can empower consumers to make a multi-dimensional, high-impact decision into something that is less intimidating. This is an imperative with no clear paths, but it's a task that few other fields are better suited to successfully resolve than our own.

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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