Climate change is a real, yet abstract phenomenon. It is so complex, and so much larger than each of us! So we might tend to let the specialists worry about it.

Could that change? Could we actually feel our carbon footprint, and whatever we may do to reduce it? Could we all coproduce environmental data and knowledge and what would it change in our own behavior? Can sustainable actions become simple, or even fun? Could environmental consciousness become a pleasant, unobtrusive, sociable part of our daily life? And how does this scale into global consciousness, knowledge, and change?

At Lift in Marseilles, 3 speakers will address these issues during the second "Changing the Planet" session (Saturday, June 20), "Co-producing and sharing environmental consciousness". For the WWF, Dennis Pamlin has been working with IT and other companies on some of these very challenges: putting sustainability at the center of their business models, rather than assigning it to "corporate responsibility". Frank Kresin will describe the "SensorNet" initiatives that the Waag Society (Amsterdam) is launching in order to distribute environmental measurement. And François Jegou will tell us how designers can assist us in inventing a Sustainable Everyday.

A friend of mine, just sent me an important and intriguing work about sustainability, which triggers me to write this post to share some of my thoughts.

The Story of Stuff - with Annie Leonard
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Sustainability, well, this is usually the thing that industrial designers feel like there are prickles down the back. It is usually perceived that engineers can far more better than us to work on this issue, at least they are more piratical than us in a way.

Interestingly, some Taiwanese friends of mine studying at Design Academy Eindhoven had also got this topic to work on and found it is really difficult to position a designer in the cycle of a ecologically sustainable system, whereas you might agree with me, the way they design is rather artistic-based - which is good because they are extremely good at sending messages to people, but for us, interaction designers, are we also good at contributing to this?

We are trained to be good "system" designers, how and what can we do to contribute designs based on "10 Little and Big Things You Can Do" as Annie points out on her website? or even improve it? Does the thinking behind designing an interactive system has values to this? or we are still like "value is rated by consumption"?

While nowadays we talk a lot about designing intelligent products and systems, almost every time when I want to start up a project I encounter a question and ask myself "Am I here just asking and convincing people to buy a product with a function they are already able to do and have?", alright, I admit that it seems that an industrial designer should not think too much like this, especially in this consumerism and material world. Indeed, we can work on emotional design or explore more possibilities of creating things by interactive technologies, even in a "magic" sense as Kees Overbeeke pointed out. But how does this fit to the world which becomes more and more (finally) aware of environments?

Time to muse a bit here on this corner of the blogosphere, this corner of Switzerland. I am sitting here and pondering a few embryonic ideas for an interactive workshop at lift08. Here are some of these ideas:

- The Art of Digital Identity
- The Business of Freedom
- Speed, Time, Money and Sex (I can not be serious about this, can I?)
- Waiting for Godot on the Matrix
- What happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin?

What do you think?
What is it that as a lift08 participant you want to spend a few hours exploring?