Sorry to get all Zen on you guys, but there is a connection and a movement if we perceive one and act on it, Gloria. Flower child or not, more power to you! I think these are choices thoughful people face in any endeavor, maybe more so with experience. There are many rewards and considerations beyond financial compensation, and (like you, maybe) I am seeing and hearing more evidence all the time that people do consider the "environmental footprint" of a company as a factor, whether they want to invest in the company or do business therewith. Maybe we have Al Gore to thank for that, but I think it's simply that the time has come.
I think there are a lot of short-term and long-term benefits to the tie-in between accessibility and sustainability, and other matters of social empathy. When I first started seriously concentrating on accessibility, I thought of it primarily as "The Right Thing to Do." Now I think of it as a structural and cognitive benefit that helps guide me through the process with fewer distractions (aware that I can embellish later without subtracting accessibility). That makes my work product more sustainable, too. Robert Frost talked about how he'd studied and used classical forms in his poetry, and felt somehow liberated by them; he compared it to a horse "learning to run light in harness." I feel the same about function and form. So the things that may seem to restrict us can also free us. There's yang in the yin, yin in the yang. The woman who conceived this Designers Accord did so on an airplane enroute to a meeting with a client. Are such transportation costs really justified with all the communications options available to us today? Would we not be wise to cultivate business closer to home? These are questions we each answer for ourselves, and little things in our own experience (having a family, for example, and being concerned about their future world) will lead us one way or another. If these considerations are indeed on the rise (they are for me, a 51-year-old guy with three teenaged children), I'm all for it. I think it takes a long time for things like this to reach a critical mass, but we've been talking about sustainability for my entire adult life. My tattered yellowed copies of "Design for the Real World" and "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" prove it! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24609 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
