Yet another energy awareness savvy article appears this weekend in the New York Times.  It discusses the powerful motivator of friendly competition to modify energy use behavior.  When people have a notion of normal behavior, they tend to change what they do. Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies ...

This month, Bruce Sterling posted the last Viridian Note, and seeing as the gist of this blog was born in the Viridian Movement, I wanted give props. (It's worth your time to enjoy this Note, either way, but if you haven't yet been exposed to Viridian, it ...

Today is World Usability Day 2008, and this year's theme is transportation.  As part of the day's events, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) has announced the Global Transport Challenge, which includes a little web-based carbon calculator. It's an easy way for you to understand how you use transportation everyday and the ...

Position papers for the "Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability" workshop of Pervasive 2008 will soon be posted online (The event also has a Facebook page).  Workshop organizer Marcus Foth, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, recently announced the selections, among them: "Using persuasive technology to encourage sustainable behavior", from ...

Edenbee is a social network working to tackle climate change through better personal choices (with a little encouragement from like-minded souls). It went into an invitational beta* earlier this month. It has all of the essentials of a social network — ways to build a network with friends, ...

Tom Raftery* at lowerfootprint.com notes that soon Dopplr will be adding carbon footprinting to the service. Dopplr is a social networking site for frequent travelers, designed to aid serendipity in travel. Users can tell their friends and colleagues of travel plans, and see who's going to be at ...

Today at SXSW Interactive, Jon Lebkowsky moderated a great panel called Visualizing Sustainability. I'll write something up about this panel in the next few days, but meanwhile, here (29 Mb .mp3) is an OK-quality recording made with my laptop. I expect a recording of better quality ...

“Our first green products must be ourselves.” In the summer of 02007, Valarie Casey, current head of software/digital experiences at IDEO, wrote an article in frog design’s bi-monthly newsletter DesignMind called the Designer’s Dilemma. She wrote, Our addiction to sweeping change has hobbled us from seeing the most obvious opportunities for ...