Reflecting on Second Intervention

This intervention for me was a way to explore further what I did as part of "Living with Your Own Ideas" course. It built forth on my feeling that to change an individuals behaviour you need to create a sense of belonging and doing it with others. The idea of this intervention was not to punish ourselves but to frame our usages in positive ways. This way we were able to think of energy spent as euros saved, transport taken as CO2 not used and food waste compared to an average citizen. It made it more fun to think of your usage in this way.

Next to this the creation of the device which we had on our table during class on Friday started some interesting conversations with our peers. They were curious to what it was and its purpose. Once we got to explaining they started to understand that we were almost already at our limit for energy used for a laptop in day while we still had some time left before class finished. It was interesting to see how such a simple device portraying something we all know about in a new way led to interesting conversations.

I feel that for me the main learning points throughout these past weeks have been that what you use does not have to be framed negatively. You are more likely to have fruitful conversations by framing an issue positively. Next to this I feel that having done this with 3 others simultaneously led to me feeling more accountable for my actions and sticking to this change. I do feel that for this to be viable to do in the future automation of the tracking is essential. It was a bit too much work as of now so that is something in the future to consider. 

I think that for design dialogues it would be interesting to scale this up in such a way that the usage is not only is it portraying in real time what is being used but how people interact not only with their own usage but also perhaps others. I'm interested in seeing how you can create communities for change by implementing simple devices or having something that starts a conversation. This intervention was a small step in that direction as we created our community in the group and saw how already using that we were challenged and motivated to stick to it. However this might be different when taking a larger group into account or people who do not find this as important. I feel that this area of tension is something I am passionate about exploring more in the future and trying to find possible solutions to.