Designing for sustainability: Breakthrough or suboptimisation?
- DOI
- 10.2991/ict4s-16.2016.7How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Sustainability, suboptimisation, OLED, energy consumption, mobile devices, agency, systems thinking, Sustainable HCI
- Abstract
Technological developments in screen technologies pitches the thinner, brighter and energy-stingy OLED screen as a possible replacement for today's television, computer and smartphone LCD screens. An OLED screen does not consume any energy at all when it displays the color black, but the potentially large energy savings can unfortunately evaporate and instead turn to losses when white is displayed. There is thus a mismatch between on the one hand the energy profiles of OLED screens and on the other hand user habits and current webpage design practices. This example thus raises important questions about system boundaries and about how to evaluate sustainable (or "sustainable") technologies. We conducted a pilot study of user acceptance of alternative, OLED-adapted color schemes for webpages. We briefly discuss the results of the study, but primarily use it as a starting point for discussing the underlying questions of where, or indeed even if it makes sense to work towards realising the OLED screens' potential for energy savings. Moving from LED to OLED screens is not only a matter of choosing between competing screen technologies, but would rather have implications for hardware and software design as well as for the practices of web designers, end users and content providers.
- Copyright
- © 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Daniel Pargman AU - Edvard Ahlsén AU - Cecilia Engelbert PY - 2016/08 DA - 2016/08 TI - Designing for sustainability: Breakthrough or suboptimisation? BT - Proceedings of ICT for Sustainability 2016 PB - Atlantis Press SP - 52 EP - 59 SN - 2352-538X UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-16.2016.7 DO - 10.2991/ict4s-16.2016.7 ID - Pargman2016/08 ER -