The Digital Civilizations Interviews

An open ecosystem of complementary services

In order to succeed, the Ecogotchi must be thought of as an open system: its specifications, format, and interface are free, including for commercial use. It’s a question of making the concept take as many shapes as possible, so that a great many sites, services, and peripheral software appear around the basic object.

The Ecogotchi should help you make decisions, serve as a kind of coach. Online services or experts could allow us to evaluate different ways of reducing our ecological impact, get advice, and weigh the cost of each decision according to several different variables: will this cost more, or less? Will it take more time, or less? What kinds of alternative and trade-off might occur? The goal is not to enforce the ecological impact as an exclusive behavioural norm, but to make it one reference point amongst others… even if it is somewhat unique.

The «social network of ecological impact»

The Ecogotchi should be a social object, a “2.0” affair, to use current terminology. It relies on an infrastructure of data exchange, both to feed and refine its calculations, and to allow us to share our findings, progress, and problems, to swap advice, challenge each other, compare ourselves to other users living elsewhere in the world and come up with joint projects, etc.

In this way, Ecogotchis’ information can be aggregated, discussed, and debated by their users. Perhaps there could be “collective Ecogotchis” in buildings, neighbourhoods, even countries… Personal, portable, open, and social, the Ecogotchi would become an everyday object, allowing everyone to reduce his or her ecological impact in an easier, more enjoyable, and even playful way. The aim is to make ecological impact a way of measuring everyday existence, a subject of discussion, a factor and a tool in individual and collective decision making, and so on.