Pathways to green personalisation: Reducing consumption through design

Abstract

Humanity has reached the point where current consumer lifestyles are not sustainable, and this status quo must be disrupted if we are to slow down climate change. Personalisation is a technique which, amongst other purposes, uses machine learning algorithms and personal data harvesting to prompt people to engage in various financial and social activities that often encourage us to consume more. It creates wealth for businesses and brings satisfaction to customers. We rely on personalised messaging and allow Artificial Intelligence (AI) select information for our personal newsfeeds, contributing to the overall personalisation economy. Personalisation is most often deliberately designed to promote consumption, but that purpose is not preordained. Designers could repurpose personalisation processes to promote ‘greener’ consumption choices or even to reduce consumption all together. This concept paper coins a new term ‘green personalisation’1 and discusses pathways to inform new approaches to reduce consumption and the resulting environmental harm.