I just want to second Cameron’s suggestion of the work by Peter-Paul Verbeek. His work using post-phenomenology is very inspiring and very relavant to your proposed research.

I am finishing my PhD on design of PV systems in the home and their use (with utlimately sustainability and lowering carbon in mind). I use science and technology studies - so you might want to look into the work of Latour (delegation of decisions to artifacts), Akrich (scripts and de-scripting use) and of course Steve Woolgar - who was at Brunel btw.

In my research I found that people change their behaviour due to several factors, including the design of the system and the design of the system interface.

Good luck with your academic travails.

Dana

Cameron

I hope you won’t let academic reduce your work to bland meaninglessness.

That said, good luck with it and congratualations.

A fridge that indicates how much energy it’s consumed, what its efficiency currently is, how much coolant has leaked, etc. might be useful.

One that simply refuses to work after a predetermined amount of time on the other hand will severely impact the lifestyles of people with marginal income — or they will simply buy a fridge that keeps working until it actually is broken. If the fridge’s “self-destruct” adds to its cost and therefore its price, this only makes things even worse for low-income owners.

Of course, any time-limited use is a rental in disguise, so the obvious thing to do is to forget all of this “built-in obsolescence” BS and just have a company actually rent the fridge (or whatever) instead of sell it. Fridges with too much “mileage” are refurbished or, past a certain point, retired in some environmentally friendly way. If long-term rental tends to be cost-competitive with ownership (say, a $600 fridge with a mean time until complete failure of 10 years and an expected cumulative maintenance cost of $100 until then, versus a more electricity-efficient rental at $65 a year, which means $650 instead of $700-plus-extra-electricity-used; the fridge renter periodically replaces the fridge with a new/refurbished one, or services it, covered by the rental fee) this would work out. If the long-term rental would cost more, up front, it could be offset by a government tax credit (for the employed) and subsidy (for the unemployed) that makes up the difference, applicable to any use of an eco-rental in place of ownership.

A more general issue is that architectures other than speedometers — particularly sticks — are inherently insulting on top of everything else, and remain so even when they are “in a good cause”. I certainly find that any product that seems to embody a philosophy of “FooCorp’s needs are more important than yours, even though you own me” to be insulting, and any “nannying” or “mother-knows-best” behavior of any kind likewise, whether it comes from government, big business, or whoever. I expect that most rational adults feel likewise — and the well-known tendency of teens to exhibit increasing resentment of parental control and coddling as they mature and exercise greater independence certainly seems to be evidence in support of this!

The tendency of those same teens that clearly expect to be trusted to be more independent to rebel, sometimes in unwise ways, if overcontrolled, also suggests a high likelihood that heavy-handed attempts at control will always provoke rebellion and backfire in potentially catastrophic ways. Anti-sit devices could beget vandalism arising from attempts to forcibly remove or destroy the devices, leaving things worse than they were. Copy-protection inevitably is broken swiftly and either ends up having had no long-term effect at all, or blows up in the company’s face (cf. Sony rootkit fiasco; also the current RIAA and AACS finger-in-the-dyke tactics and attendant bad publicity). Eco-fridges that spontaneously stop functioning for gratuitous reasons will provoke hacks and workarounds, especially by less wealthy users that can’t afford to replace them more frequently than “when they actually genuinely honestly fail”. Such hacks will nullify the effectiveness of the “eco” controlling behavior, and if they affect the performance of the fridge, tend to involve some coolant leakage when applied, or whatever, they may even make things worse.

Of course, one could argue that the fridge really does cost the more-frequent-replacement cost because of the negative externality it imposes on the environment in its use. That isn’t going to cut much ice with some poor person who has only X dollars to spend per month on their fridge, amortized, and needs to keep their food from spoiling. Nor will you get much sympathy if you tell poor people “tough; poor people should only eat canned food and other stuff with a long unrefrigerated shelf-life” or something equally stupid. In any case, human nature is to resist the gratuitous imposition of a “stick” type control, and often to resent or chafe even at a “carrot” when there’s some ulterior motive, however benign. Appliances doling out happy-face stickers for eco-friendly usage are likely to be frequently given the finger by adults that find such behavior insulting or insipid. That’s until the adult figures out how to mute it.

My recommendation: stick to purely-informative “speedometer” methods in actual deployment of real products, and leave it up to the intelligent and mature adult (or, for child users, the parents) to decide what to do with the environmental information and the like, weighing it against their budgetary constraints and other relevant information to make a balanced, individual choice. Making adults’ choices for them, on the other hand, is a sure way to failure and possibly even a backfiring of your intent.

Just imagine the cacophony whenever the Chelsea tractor driver uses kick-down.

I look forward to more wonderful posts from you.