Sustainability Design: Lessons from Designing A "Green Map"

Abstract

The prevalence of urban agriculture groups mobilizing to create change in cities provides a rich opportunity to understand how these communities use and can design ICTs to support sustainability. In particular, organizations are using ‘green maps’ to make visible local projects, initiatives, and features, in order to reduce entrance barriers and increase participation. This paper reflects on the role of ICTs in these communities as well as the role of design in addressing sustainability concerns. It reports on a design project that developed a green mapping platform to ameliorate the challenges that individuals face in discovering and participating in community-based ‘green’ initiatives. In order to do so, the project adopted sustainability design principles and a participatory approach. While preliminary evaluation concluded the project did not achieve its original objectives, it provided a valuable exploration of practises to address and evaluate sustainability in design projects. It highlighted the value of participation in processes rather than creation of technology products and pointed to lacking support for sustainability in current methods and techniques for systems design. The paper ends with reflections on sustainability design opportunities for community mapping and identifies future areas for exploration