October 2007

A quick thanks to Solidariti for including a question from us in their Q+A with Patrick Pittman, a Director of WA based Papercut Media, which you can read here.

Our question was this: “Can design agencies who predominantly work for clients who push a consumption-based way of life claim to be “eco-friendly” by offsetting their direct carbon emissions?”

Patrick’s response included the following bites; “It’s better than nothing. But barely, and in some senses it’s worse than nothing…you cannot outsource your own, or your corporate, responsibility”. Eco-consumerism is not an appropriate response to the issue of global warming.

He’s right. It’s not.

Carbon credits in and of themselves are a good thing, enabling individuals and companies to take responsibility for unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions. There’s also nothing wrong with buying stuff you need (though some peoples’ definition of ‘need’ might require tweaking). But to encourage the culture of consumerism and offset the activities involved in such encouragement is hardly helping the environment.

p.s. we tip our hat to Papercut Media, they are our kind of company.

The results from Digital Eskimo’s first (personal) waste audit were quite encouraging.

Digital Eskimo’s staff were to keep all the waste they generated in a week inside a bag on their desktop (except compostable waste). We compared the contents of everyone’s bags at the end of the week and made some interesting findings, the most interesting being that you can in fact generate no waste at all.

No-one had excessive amounts of rubbish or recyclable materials, but our Executive Producer, Penny Hagen, collected only a single bent paper clip. Had she not been so distracted during a conversation she might not have absent-mindedly bent it out of shape and she could have been scott-free for the whole week.

Most of the waste (about 70%) was able to be recycled, which was pleasing to see. But Penny showed us that, with some planning, some tupperware, eating in and remembering to refuse what you don’t need at the till, you can drastically reduce your resource consumption and waste to landfill.

As a company, possibly the largest component of our carbon footprint is in energy use. Even though we don’t have air-conditioning, the computers we use consume energy.

We’ve been running GreenPower long before it was fashionable to reduce this footprint. In keeping with the “Reduce, Renew, Offset” philosophy, we also use energy efficient computers wherever possible. Many staff use energy efficient laptops iMacs and our file server is a Mac Mini – basically a laptop in a cute desktop package.

So we’re glad to see the IT industry as a whole starting to make significant moves to improve energy efficiency in the computers that now are essential in running much of Australia’s, and the world’s, economies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note to point you to a Q&A I did with Priscilla at Solidariti.com as part of a series she is doing with a number of digital agencies.

The Q&A covers a bit about Digital Eskimo’s approach, ways non-profits can leverage the net and more. (Thanks to Priscilla for the opportunity).

This post was triggered whilst reading ‘Designing for interaction‘ by Dan Saffer (of Adaptive Path). I’ll admit I haven’t quite got to the last page yet but I’m happy to recommend it already. Unlike some of the other more amorphous or academic texts on the subject this book is a useful, intelligent and digestible description of what we do all day. Saffer includes a section on Design Research (a topic along with ‘design thinking’ that is fast gaining attention in and out of the design world and something we specialise in at Digital Eskimo). Saffer outlines three design research methods: Observation, Interviews and Design Activities. What got me interested in particular was the use of the term Design Activities…

Read the rest of this entry »