Eli has included some additional material below, which can be viewed in connection with his piece:

1. While it may be cliché to take up the theme of humankind’s relationship to nature, it is nonetheless essential to the matter at hand. Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial is too influential in design and the computer sciences to be ignored and it explicitly engages this theme. A number of other key authors take up the relationship between technology and nature or at least the theme of nature as a model for design of the artificial, including Christopher’s Alexander epic volumes on the Nature of Order, Tony Fry’s A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, Freeman Dyson’s lecture Ten Tales for Technophiles, Victor Margolin’s essay The Two Herberts, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, and Anne Marie Willis’ essay Ontological Designing.
   • Simon, H. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.).MIT Press.
   • Alexander, C. (2002). The Nature of Order. Volume II. The Center for Environmental Structure. Berkeley, CA.
   • Fry, T. (1999). A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. New South Wales, Australia: NSWU Press.
   • Margolin, V. (2002). The Two Herberts. In Margolin, V. The Politics of the Artificial. University of Chicago Press.
   • Winograd, T. & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. New York: Addison-Wesley, Inc.
   • Willis, A.M. (2006). Ontological designing. Design Philosophy Papers. #02/2006.
2. A fantastic ethnographic and photographic treatment of global cultural differences in attitudes towards materialism is presented by Peter Menzel in Material World: A Global Family Portrait.
   • Menzel, P. (1994). Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Sierra Club Books. San Francisco, CA USA.
3. There are now a great many authors who have addressed the issues of information technologies and sustainability directly in some way, including Friedman, Kahn, and Borning; Fry; Mankoff and others; McDonough and Braungart; Nardi and others; Nelson and Stolterman; Stegall; Thackara; VerBeek.
   • Friedman, B., Kahn, P., and Borning, A. (2006). Value sensitive design and information systems. In P. Zhang & D. Galletta (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations. M.E. Sharpe, New York, 348-372.
   • Mankoff, J., Blevis, E., Borning, A., Friedman, B., Fussell, S., Hasbrouk, J., Sengers, P., & Woodruf, A. 2007, April). Sustainability and interaction. (SIG). In Ext. Abs. of CHI’07. ACM Press, New York, NY.
   • Mankoff, J., Matthews, D., Fussell, S. R., and Johnson, M. (2007) Leveraging social networks to motivate individuals to reduce their ecological footprints. In Proc. of HICSS 2007.
   • McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press.
   • Nardi, B.A. & Others (2003). A social ecology of wireless technology by Critical Friends of Technology. First Monday, volume 8, number 8 (August 2003).
   • Nelson, H. & Stolterman, E. (2003). The Design Way—Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. Educational Technology Publications. New Jersey.
   • Stegall, N. (2006). Designing sustainability: a philosophy for ecologically intentional design. Design Issues. 22(2).56-63.
   • Thackara, John. (2005). In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World. MIT Press.
   • Verbeek, P.P. (2005), What Things Do – Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Penn State: Penn State University Press, ISBN 0-271-02539-5