Designing for a Sustainable Future

Special: Highlight Topic 3 – published July 7, 2011; updated December 22, 2011

Rural landscapeWe would like to continue the tradition of publishing highlight topics on the SAP Design Guild Website with a collection of articles focusing on the topic of how design can support sustainability. Sustainability has already been a prominent topic in the "real" world for decades. In recent years, though, it has also become more visible in the HCI community – reason enough to devote more attention to it on the SAP Design Guild Website.

The main reason for starting this highlight topic is, however, that there was a sustainability session – with SAP User Experience participation – at the DUXU 2011 conference in Orlando, USA, in Mid July 2011. The session, entitled "Sustainability: Future Roles, Responsibilities, and Opportunities for the HCI Profession", was co-chaired by SAP UX team members Christine Ronnewinkel and Janaki Kumar. A number of other SAP UX colleagues contributed papers to the session. Aaron Marcus (AM+A) organized this new conference, which was held under the HCI International 2011 umbrella. Together with two colleagues, he also contributed a paper to the session (for an overview of the session see Introducing the Sustainability Session at DUXU 2011).

This highlight topic aims to support the session and promote it by drawing it to the attention of the professional design public. Moreover, it complements the session with further articles and information, including a selection of related links and a glossary. And last but not least – and accommodating the recent interest in the topic of sustainability in the design field – it presents sustainability-related information on the SAP Design Guild Website in one location for easier access.

Because the DUXU 2011 session is topical right now, we decided to release the highlight topic at an early stage, that is, with a relatively small number of articles. We extended it in the course of the following months and closed the "active" phase of the highlight topic at the end of 2011.

Once again, we hope that offering related articles in one place will make it easier for our visitors to catch up on a certain field of interest. And naturally, we hope you will find the articles in this highlight topic both useful and interesting to read.

As a starter, you may want to read this article: Introducing the Highlight Topic "Sustainability".

 

Further Highlight Topics