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 impact it has on our environment.

You will be able to:

• MEASURE your everyday transportation usage
• MONITOR your  personal carbon travel footprint and compare yourself to othersaround the world
• MINIMIZE your energy usage through alternative transportation choices, carbon offsets, and simple travel changes  thereby maximizing the impact on our world.

Today there are World Usability Day events in over 40 countries, many will be webcast,  and some will take place online only.   World Usability Day is a UPA initiative to

provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere. [Link]

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“Using persuasive technology to encourage sustainable behavior”, from a group in the Netherlands; “Taking the Guesswork out of Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyles” from a team in the US;  and a Swiss contributed paper, “The Potential of UbiComp Technologies to Determine the Carbon Footprints of Products.”

The workshop promises to address issues around the design of augmenting, pervasive systems that aim to persuade:

Providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks - may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change.

This sounds right up our alley; I only wish I could avoid the long carbon-rich flight to Australia to justify attendance.   I hope the organizers provide an open format for publishing and sharing results and even encourage participation from remote participants.   

Do check out the workshop webpage for links to some good resources.

Speaking of conferences, this weekend is CHI 2008, the SIGCHI conference, in Florence, Italy.  This year the conference is “going green” — due to the encouragement of a few folks from the Sustainable CHI Google Group, I believe.

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“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 improvement. In order to create a radical position around sustainability, we need to change our concept of design. Our first green products must be ourselves.

In the article, she proposes a “Kyoto Treaty of Design” – now called the Designers Accord. The community that’s formed around the Designers Accord is now 15,000 strong. The Accord is something revolutionary – a coalition of designers and design firms committed to stimulating mass change in product design.

First, designers and design firms commit “to proactively engage in dialogue about environmental impact with each and every client and customer, and to integrate sustainable alternatives in our work.”

By pooling our knowledge, we can create a network in which every client is compelled to engage in a discussion of sustainability – no matter which firm it selects as a design partner. Together, we can advocate for the improvements – large and small – that will produce lasting change.

Second, adopters of the accord make a committment to open knowledge-sharing, “so that all may benefit and build on marketable and sustainable solutions.”

The website notes that

The Designers Accord is for all designers – interaction, digital, industrial, graphic, advertising, architecture, interior – and those involved in the design industry, including engineers, business consultants, researchers, marketers, corporations, and educational institutions. Any designer, consultancy, or organization creating consequence at scale should join.

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