"We at
Microsoft have a moral obligation to make our products as clean and green as they can be."
So said Mark Aggar, Microsoft's director of Environmental Technology Strategy, at the outset of the final panel at
Greener by Design 2009: "Designing for Energy Efficiency."
The panel brought together designers from the technology and design worlds to look at how energy efficiency can be built into products and systems to make an impact on the environmental performance of electronics.
While we've covered Microsoft's many green endeavors often -- from their
internal operations efficiency projects to their
green data center goals, one of the biggest challenges facing energy efficient design is getting buy-in from companies and shoppers alike.
"In the real world, people don't want energy efficiency; they don't think about ROI [return on investment]," said Ted Howes, the global business lead for sustainability at design firm
IDEO. "People say, 'that doesn't motivate me.' You have to build on what people care about and piggyback on top of that some energy efficiency." He added that finding that other hook -- whether it's community, aesthetics, family or something else -- is what is going to motivate people to embrace energy efficiency.
Aggar agreed, to some extent, although point out that there is a huge gap in interest in energy efficiency between individual consumers and companies.
"From the commercial perspctive, there's a huge incentive," Aggar said. "Data centers have massive opportunities for efficiency in data centers, both in terms of how efficiently a data center runs ... but then also on the utilization side as well: If you've got the most efficient data center in the world, but all your servers are idle, then that's a big waste."
The Designing Energy Efficiency Panel: From left, GreenOrder's Stephen Linaweaver (moderator), Microsoft's Mark Aggar, Susan Gladwin, and IDEO's Ted Howes.
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Overall, Aggar said the electronics industry is making strides in boosting performance while using less energy -- "but if the products aren't attractive, then it's a moot point: energy efficiency is a tiebreaker, but products have to be appealing as well."
What it comes down to, for Howes, is that designing efficiency into systems on a larger scale, is what will spread efficiency's impact. "You can design the system so it works in the background and they don't have to think about it," Howes explained. Design, for example, can automate the function of a household to optimize smart energy use; another successful approach is to help people become aware of their energy use through other means.
Susan Gladwin, the president of
Gladwin Consulting and the third member of the panel, explained how individuals seem most motivated by efficiency. "People aren't interest in rewards [for energy efficiency]," she said, "they're interested in status, in point of pride, in being seen as the most efficient, and so on."
An example that Howes offered to illustrate this point is that of Positive Energy, which has been sending utility bills
comparing how one house's energy bill compares with its neighbors. The project, which has been adopted by a handful of utility companies already, is finding that this simple competition can make big progress in getting people to think about and improve their energy efficiency.
In the end, the role of product designers -- both in high-tech design and any other types of electronics -- is to make energy efficiency easy. Technology should do a lot of the heavy lifting for end-users to make efficient operations mindless or even inescapable.
"A lot of the time we design in little tweaks that are better for energy efficiency, and we just don't tell the client about it," Howes told the crowd.
