PrintMarmoset: Redesigning the Print Button for Sustainability

Summary:

This paper begins by introducing sustainable interaction design (SID). SID deals with conventions of learned perceptions and behaviors. That means that SID motivates users to pay attention to sustainability, while still concentrating on usability issues. The research mentions that SID demands a deep understanding of the social and evolving aspects of design.

When evaluating SID, usually task-centric techniques are used. In this paper, they come up with a SID for printing to prove their hypothesis that behavior change is a more convincing metric than attitude change. A primary use of the study is to examine a new design of the print button that will reduce the amount of paper we waste.

The researchers conducted a study amongst several different people and concluded that printing is here to stay. Most subjects agreed that when you print something it holds more importance. Some said that printing directions is easier than using a GPS. When asked about printing a large amount of pages, most subjects said they would think twice. They generally agreed that wasting paper was bad. They also said that given the overhead of sorting through content needed and not needed on a website, they would overwhelmingly choose to print the entire page.

After doing some prototyping, they found that a solution required the following:

• require neither developers to modify existing web sites nor users to change existing print flow
• require the least amount of user input effort, if not zero
• offer flexibility that allows users to choose what to print in addition to pre-defined filter or template
• maintain a history of print activities for collecting and organizing web clips
• raise awareness of the tool among people and build a “green” community around it
  

In the end, they designed a system that had a minimalist user interface, lightweight document image processing, and printmark sharing and print data visualizations. This is an example of how the system would work:

1. Go to a web page - use a news article, for example.
2. Press print, PrintMarmoset automatically selects content.
3. The user can then 'stroke' over content to remove it.
4. Print out the remaining content.

The paper has a good demonstration of this with a nice picture: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1520000/1518720/p109-xiao.pdf?key1=1518720&key2=5893816621&coll=&dl=&CFID=77922518&CFTOKEN=72378500

The paper did not get into great detail about methods used for implementation. Instead, they discussed their goals in the research. Their first was to bring SID to light. Their second was to use an easy exercise (printing) to show the potential of SID.

Comments:

I think that the paper brought a very interesting idea forward. Printing usually is a hassle, especially off of a web page news article. Using a sustainable design proved to allow users to interact minimally with the program to achieve goals. SID is a cool area that I think can help a lot in CHI studies.