Designing with the Solar Internet: Towards Constraint-Based Design for Sustainable Consumption

In response to the escalating impact of mindless consumption in the fashion and IT industry, we began to think of and with a constraintbased approach to interaction design. This paper describes a research through design investigation into a paradigm of constraintbased design, founded on the practical and perceived constraints of solar-powered internet. Our intention is not to examine individual consumer as a site for sustainable transition, but the industries and industry practitioners at the interface with consumers. We employed strategies that included optimisation as a form of minimisation, visibility as a means to mark existing absence, offloading from automation, and the design of dead-ends. We discuss the challenges in learning to design against the cornucopian paradigm. While the overall vision of an internet powered by the sun seems at once desirable and achievable, the pursuit of a constraints-based interaction design highlights the desire to confirm the dominant paradigm of abundance.