Sustainable design lecture

Today's lecture was about sustainable design, we looked at several areas that contribute to this practice. Economic, environmental and social aspects all factor into good sustainability, these elements add up to a term called "the triple bottom line". If a designed product features aspects that fulfill these requirements then it has a great chance of being sustainable. 

A video that we watched talked about these elements and the fact that they require a fourth element to be successful, function. If a product doesn't fulfill its function well then it won’t be adopted by people and the elements of the triple bottom line will not be carried across to the world.

Sustainability has many benefits in various areas, an area we looked at was sustainable energy and how it is affecting cars. Oil will eventually run out and it is forcing people to find new ways of making cars and look for new fuel sources. They hybrid car was looked at, I know a fair amount about hybrid cars and firmly believe that even though they tick the boxes to make it a sustainable product, it is in fact a false positive. Hybrid cars use two engines, the traditional combustion engine fueled my fossil fuels and an electrical engine powered by a battery. These engines work in conjunction with each other to lower the amount of petrol the car uses, the fact is that hybrid cars still use petrol and the majority or electricity the cars use come from power plants that still use finite or harmful resources. The cars do reduce the cost of travel by reducing the amount of petrol they require which fulfills the economic side of the triple bottom line. The hybrid cars do reduce the amount of pollution output from the cars. The hybrid cars do help put across the message of caring about your carbon footprint. These all fulfill the triple bottom line, the problem is that the function of the product does not support this, the hybrid car is simply a half step in the right direction and not the full innovation the world needs.

We later looked at how this method of sustainable design can be and is used in games design. One of the mode obvious cases was the digital media and content, digital games have no packaging and thus no damage on the environment, they often have large communities that form their own cultures and in some cases their own markets and economies, the ability to increase the longevity of a game through online purchases gives credit to the economic side of the argument. Some prime examples of games that have had good sustainable design shown bellow.

Whats cool for kinds. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.whatscoolforkids.com/littlebigplanet.html

Little bog planet has sustainability through user generated content, long after the game had shipped the players were creating increasingly more imaginative levels. This game had user generated content as a focus from the start of development and it carried the game past release.

Foroughi, C. (n.d.). League of Legends: The Unsung Hero of the Online Competitive Gaming Scene. Retrieved from http://obsoletegamer.com/league-of-legends-review/

League of legends is an online multiplayer game that has a large community, the game itself is free and makes it's money through micro transactions.