Computing Reviews

User experience in the age of sustainability :a practitioner’s blueprint
Kramer K., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.,San Francisco, CA,2012. 224 pp.Type:Book
Date Reviewed: 08/08/12

In a 1984 New Yorker cartoon [1], Lorenz depicts a man shopping with a basket at a booth labeled “In the marketplace of ideas.” The man asks the salesclerk, “Just how fresh are these insights?” This book contains fresh insights.

Kramer is a bridge between the disciplines of user experience and sustainability. More precisely, Kramer constructs a bridge. She first brings clarity to the sustainability body of knowledge, building out, brick by brick, concepts such as the waste hierarchy and the six “Rs”: reduce, reuse, recycle, restore, rethink, and redesign. She then links sustainability and user experience to a new concept, sustainable user experience, through several sustainability frameworks, including natural capitalism [2].

Next, Kramer connects the dots between sustainability and software development and product design life cycles. She concludes with a definition of biologic principles for usability and sustainability [3].

Womack and Jones’s Lean thinking energized manufacturing in the late 1990s [4]. In the same way, I hope this book sparks the enthusiasm and effort of user experience professionals, product designers, and system developers to improve the utilization of information resources. Kramer has provided the knowledge and a bridge for doing just that.


1)

Lorenz, L. In the marketplace of ideas. New Yorker. Sept. 24, 1984, 47.


2)

Hawken, P.; Lovins, A.; Lovins, L. H. Natural capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution. Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1999.


3)

Wann, D. Bio logic: designing with nature to protect the environment (rev. ed.). Johnson Books, Boulder, CO, 1994.


4)

Womack, J. P.; Jones, D. T. Lean thinking: banish waste and create wealth in your corporation. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1996.

Reviewer:  Ernest Hughes Review #: CR140566 (1301-0025)

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