Much of what I read about Green Design involves building the product with recycled or renewable materials and consumables and making the product recyclable at the end of its life. Hardware engineers can contribute to the green effort by influencing how the product is made and what it is made of. But what about software and firmware engineers? Their end product is a bunch of intangible bits flowing through hardware. Those bits don’t pollute the environment or end up in landfills. So how can they be green in their designs?

I came across the answer while reading about industrial designer Gadi Amit’s unusual approach to Green Design: make products so desirable that people just won’t want to throw them away. (Sacks, Danielle. “What’s Wrong With Green Design.” Fast Company Oct. 2010: 166-69. Or online at FastCompany.com. 1 Oct. 2010.) Amit gave an example that the 8-year-old Palm Zire is still used today because it works well, and people have an emotional connection with it. He then observed that in contrast, PCs at first work fast, but after a while get bogged down with old programs, temporary files, and bloated registries. Users often get so frustrated with their slow machines that they simply buy new ones and throw away the old ones.

In other words, Amit is encouraging us to make the product function so well that users will not want to throw it away. What a novel and green concept! Let me cite two examples from Hewlett-Packard.

The Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator was green before green was mainstreamed. It was introduced in 1981 and is still being sold in stores today, 29 years later. It is a well-designed product that well suits the financial community. HP did not set out to design a green financial calculator; they set out to design a top-notch calculator that exceeds the needs of their customers.

Several years ago, while I was working in HP’s LaserJet printer design lab, management focused on a problem of decreasing sales. Research showed that the market was fairly well saturated and that the existing LaserJet customers would not buy new LaserJet printers because their old LaserJet printers were still working just fine. HP LaserJet printers were, in a sense, green because customers were happy to keep them longer before throwing them away.

What about your products? Are you working with customers to make sure you are producing what they want? Are you designing your software and firmware to the best of your ability? Producing top quality software and firmware that does what customers want should be part of an overall green strategy. But you might say, those efforts will likely take longer and result in a more costly product. However, as Gadi said, “…more expensive objects … will create the economy and the justification to slow down the cycle of obsolescence.”

Of course, our efforts at Green Design might quickly bump into the pressures of fast-changing technology, marketing-induced consumer appetites for the latest and greatest gadgets, and business demands for steady or increasing revenue streams, but this is a topic for someone on the business side of technology to discuss. For now, think green and produce green code.