Citizen Science

  • Testing how design features and interactions can improve, motivate, make users engage more with platforms.
  • Explore how others applications, products, platforms and online communities incentive users to give design ideas or feedback about the system itself.
  • Finding out how ACES visitors are experiencing the NN platform so far.

Conscious consumption: decision support tool

New idea that I have been interested lately:

  • What: Finding out where products and its parts come from: where they were produced, manufactured, extracted, cultivated, by whom, in which conditions, etc.
  • Purchasing decisions impact companies and the products they manufacture.
  • Supporting the production of more socially and environmentally sound products.
  • Trends: fair trade, organic, local, non-GMO, sustainably harvested, new consumers.
  • How: Revealing supply chains: who buys what from whom? Creating an information system based on crowdsourcing community, where input comes from consumers, manufactures and suppliers.  
  • Motivations to disclosure data: Suppliers: gain buyers, reputation. Manufactures: reputation, publicity. Consumers: want to know what they are buying.
  • Why:
    Environmental: sustainability, finite resources, ecological efficiency, carbon-footprint.
    Social: working conditions, regulations, forced labor and slavery. 
    Economical: consumption and demand, economical sustainability, markets.

What I've found so far:

  • Article on Science, June 2014: The science of sustainable supply chains,  Dara O’Rourke, Berkeley.
  • GoodGuide.com: GoodGuide scientists rate products on a 0 to 10 scale for their health, environment, and social impact. Companies are looking for help with their ratings, so GoodGuide is launching a Manufacturer's Portal with data it collects on supply chains. The system is accessible on website and a bar-code-scanning iPhone app.
  • Motivating Change: Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment.  Edited by Robert Crocker and Steffen Lehmann.
  • WWF: Market Transformation Initiative (MTI): an ambitious global agenda to change the way that these “soft” commodities are produced, traded and bought, with the aim of making sustainable production the norm.
  • E*TRADE's Bar Code Scanner: find access to quick information about the company including stock quotes, news and their portfolio.