🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA | F23.07
Sustainability Scoop: How can we design more sustainably, Is using dark mode more environmentally friendly, and Coca Cola!
👋 Announcements — Welcome Back!
🍂Welcome back from fall break everyone! We hope you all had a fun and relaxing week and are psyched for the year ahead. Short note—we’re recruiting! If you’re interested in joining our team and working on putting out awesome design content, please fill out the form below! 🕺
🍎 Campus Compass — Service Design
Written & edited by: 😈 Sophie McGrady
☕️ What does it mean when a company sells a service? How is a service different from a good? Why is it important to learn to design services well? This week’s Campus Compass spotlights 05-452 Service Design. In this course, you dive into these questions and topics as you learn to both define and design a service of your own.
🤔 What is 05-452 Service Design?
In this course, you will have the chance to define, study, and design for services and product service systems. You will learn the basics of how to model the current state of a service and how to both envision and refine a new service that advances the original service.
🧐 What do you do in 05-452 Service Design?
Through lectures and studio projects, both individual and group, you will identify a service, product service system, and platform, and you will discuss the components that make up each. Additionally, you will work to demonstrate how a service can unfold through both design and communication. Another key part of this course is critique. You will get the chance to practice both receiving and giving critique and drawing actionable insights from feedback gathered from your peers.
😯 Who should take 05-452 Service Design?
There are no prerequisites for this course! Service Design is relevant to any student who thinks they may work for a service one day and be asked to innovate for this service.
🍀 Editor’s Pick — Coca-Cola and Sustainable Design
Written & edited by: 😈 Sophie McGrady
🧑💻 In an interview conducted by The Drum, Rapha Abreu, Coca-Cola’s Vice President of Design examines the balance between sustainable design and brand.
As one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters for the fifth consecutive year in 2022 (according to Break Free From Plastic’s annual audit) Coca-Cola has committed to some ambitious goals of incorporating sustainability into its mission and brand. Read more below! 🤔
🎯 Resource — How Can We Design More Sustainably?
Written & edited by: 🧸 Ahana Banerjee
🧐 What is sustainable design?
💡 Sustainable design involves creating products and services with careful consideration of their impact on the environment, society, and the economy throughout their entire life cycle. It's all about making sure that what we use today doesn't harm the well-being of current and future generations while meeting our needs in socially fair, environmentally friendly, and economically sound ways.
❇️ How can I practice sustainable design strategies?
💡 While there are numerous ways to embrace and incorporate sustainable design principles, here are some key approaches.
🧩 Modularity: Enables adaptability and reconfiguration, promoting sustainability by enhancing a product's versatility and lifespan.
📈 Longevity: Crafting products with a timeless and attractive look, built to last, and capable of holding their value over the years, making it easy for people to sell or share them with others.
🛠 Repairability: Stuff wears out, breaks, and sometimes gets damaged, so it's important to design things in a way that makes them easy to repair, upgrade, and fix.
⚖️ Equity: Changing the old-fashioned ideas and stereotypes that can block equal access to resources, whether it's tied to gender stereotypes or other outdated notions.
⚙️ Systems change: Rather than viewing your product in isolation, consider it as a dynamic element within a system, engaging with other components and, as a result, creating effects.
⛔ What should I avoid when practicing sustainable design?
💡 There are some tricky techniques that nudge consumers into unsustainable or unfair practices. Be on the lookout for these when designing for others, and remember that genuine product quality should take priority over flashy green marketing!
👺 Design for obsolescence: To intentionally design products to wear out or become obsolete, often encouraging customers to repeat purchases.
😈 Design for disposability: To design products to have a limited lifespan, fueled by our culture's growing acceptance of throwaway goods, which leads to negative environmental and economic consequences.
👹 Dark patterning: To manipulate and coerce customers into making choices they might not freely opt for, often by exploiting cognitive biases and creating a sense of urgency.
🙈 Cool - Shrimp Leather
🦐 Check out this startup at the intersection of design, fashion, and innovation that is turning seafood waste into leather to mitigate the harmful impact of the traditional leather industry! 🐄
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this week’s issue are 😊 Eunice Lee, 🥸 Kaitlyn Ng, 😈 Sophie McGrady, 🧸 Ahana Banerjee, 🕺 Arin Pantja, 🐳 Alana Wu, and 🦝 Caleb Sun.
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