Seeing What Is and What Can Be: On Sustainability, Respect for Work, and Design for Respect

This paper privileges visual contributions—original images and referenced materials—nearly as much as text. As such, it follows a trend towards pictorials and image intensive papers elsewhere in SIGCHI venues that have yet to find acceptance in the CHI paper tracks. The paper in both its text and its visual contributions takes up (a) ongoing questions of how designs matter—especially in relation to sustainability, (b) questions of extending notions of sustainability beyond the environment to include notions from respect for human labor to respect between nations, (c) questions of the utility of photographic methods in building design understanding and conceptualization, (d) questions of emphasis and extension for Rams’ principles of good design, and (e) hypotheses about the relations between seemingly small design details and global attitudes, policy, and harmony, inspired by Allison’s account of Thucydides’ Trap. These are big questions. It is their ambitious character that unifies them.