Warm up exercise

I wrote a bit more than I intended to here! Feel free to skim

I began my ideation by considering ‘products’. It is difficult for me to choose a favorite product, as the word product to me connotes the potential of a transaction (even though the definition of the word doesn’t include it); I feel like once I have the product I cease to think of it as a product. Instead of choosing my favorite, I decided to look at a ubiquitous product, and perhaps the thing which best exemplifies what I think of when I think of the word ‘product’: a smartphone.

I then began to imagine the sustainability impacts of a smartphone. It is important to define what sustainability means to me in the current discussion.  Sustainability encompasses much more than environmental impact. I want to look at a few different aspects of sustainability: including sustainability of smartphone usage for our mental health, sustainability of smartphone usage for our political system, and sustainability of smartphone usage for the environment. For each of these three aspects of sustainability, I ideated a single set of pros and cons of smartphone usage.

To start with, I looked at mental health. Through study in previous classes (media psychology, developmental psychology, social computing), my current belief about mental health impacts of smartphones revolves around the concept of a double edged sword. For instance, a positive impact smartphones have on our mental health is the ability to stay connected with our families. Speaking from personal experience, my dad, grandparents, and half siblings have lived 16 hours across the world my entire life. Digital communication, first on computers when I was a child, now on smartphones, has allowed me to have a relationship with them where otherwise I would have none. However, this constant communication ability that has been so beneficial for me can cause others problems. The necessity and addictiveness of constant communication and attention has removed many of the mundane, meditative spaces from our lives. In middle school, before I had a phone, I would walk to school in silence, listening to birds or holding a conversation. Now, anytime I walk somewhere I need to make a conscious effort to take out my headphones and let my mind clear, even for a moment.

Moving on to our political system: Smartphones and social media in general are an incredibly maligned factor in our country’s political climate. On one hand, all of us have an unprecedented access to information, and could theoretically make more informed choices than ever before. On the other hand, speed of and access to information coincides with speed of and access to misinformation. It is possible that smartphones and social media have allowed pockets of misinformed and propagandized populations to grow and thrive in a way that they haven’t before. It’s also possible that these issues are not new, they just now moved online. I have no idea how misinformed the general population was relative to how they are now, and I would need to do more research on it to come to a conclusion. Whether or not smartphones are actively causing problems for the sustainability of our political system, there are certainly innovations and design improvements that could help mitigate it.

Finally and in my opinion most importantly: the environment. The impact of smartphones on environmental sustainability are perhaps less salient than on our mental health or political system. However, I do believe that they exemplify larger issues in our economic system that are part of the cause of environmental degradation. But first, a benefit. Smartphones are part of the shift towards digitization, and therefore help preserve trees by allowing us to use less paper (Woohooo!). Unfortunately, I believe that the production of the physical apparatus of a smartphone is one of the chief offenders (in terms of ubiquity of the product, not actual impact) of an economic shift away from products built to last towards products designed to be replaced. I do not know whether or not Apple and other manufacturers actually engage in planned obselescence, but I do know that they do not have a specific economic incentive to make their products last more than a few years. It is hard for me to believe that my phone really needs to slow down every two years as much as it does. These companies make so much more money when they can sell a phone every two years than every 4 years. I know this idea is far more applicable to things like fast fashion, but smartphones and other electronics involve non-renewable resources, and while I know that the most important ones are recycled, I constantly hear about the dwindling supplies of lithium and scarcity of aluminum. I am not an expert on this topic at all, but it is something I wanted to note here.

Finally, adding sustainability as a capability and a characteristic!

I am defining capability loosely as something that the smartphone could do to help with sustainability, but doesn’t yet, without changing anything inherent about itself.

I believe that an important smartphone capability that could have a huge sustainability impact (on our mental health) would be better integrated activity monitors. I know that apple has its screen time app, and there are countless third party apps out there. But these third party apps are too easy to disable or delete, and the activity monitor doesn’t do anything besides shaming. I remember playing on my nintendo wii as a kid, before such massive amounts of screen-time were normalized, and it would ask you every few games if you wanted to take a break. I think a little interruption of that sort, especially where users can set beforehand what times they want their phone to enforce, would be very helpful. Having this built in to the product out of the boxed, with sensible defaults but customizable options, would help people get over the hump of social media addiction. Designs are shown in my sketch!

As a characteristic (which I am imagining as more of an inherent change):

I don’t know the technology behind it, but a smartphone designed to last for 5 years instead of 2-3 could be incredibly beneficial for our environment, and also societally set the tone for other industries; enforcing that this issues is something that large companies are thinking about and something that consumers care about (I don’t know if they are, but this is my design thinking exercise!). I don’t know why phones slow down to a crawl the way they do, but whether this involves a more modular setup of the internals so that the causes of the problem can be easily replaced, or whether we simply need a slightly thicker phone to allow better management of heat to not damage the components so much, prioritizing longevity as a designed characteristic of smartphones would be highly beneficial.